Rhodopsalta, Dugdale, 1972

Bator, John, Marshall, David C, Hill, Kathy B R, Cooley, John R, Leston, Adam & Simon, Chris, 2022, Phylogeography of the endemic red-tailed cicadas of New Zealand (Hemiptera: Cicadidae: Rhodopsalta), and molecular, morphological and bioacoustical confirmation of the existence of Hudson’s Rhodopsalta microdora, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 195 (4), pp. 1219-1244 : 1233

RHODOPSALTA EVOLUTIONARY SCENARIOS

Rhodopsalta microdora split from its congeners ~5.5 Mya according to the *BEAST analysis (see Fig. 4 ), at the beginning of the Pliocene epoch. At this time, NI was separated from SI by a wide sea strait, the Manawatu Strait ( Fig. 1 ). We suggest a few hypotheses to shed light on the potential evolutionary scenarios for Rhodopsalta . These scenarios are based on mean date estimates, but alternative scenarios might be supported if the true dates are substantially different for reasons noted above.

Figures

Figure 1. Palaeogeographical maps depicting topographical change in the North Island of New Zealand throughout the Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs. Maps were modified and reprinted from Ellis et al. (2015), with permission.

Figure 4. Bayesian phylogenetic tree based on 2284 bp of concatenated genes (5′ and 3′ cox1 and EF1α). Six partition subsets were used (by gene and codon position for each gene, respectively). Branch support values represent Bayesian posterior probabilities and RAXML bootstrap percentages from 1000 non-parametric pseudoreplicates. The number of parsimony-informative sites is 300. Grey boxes show mean divergence time estimates and 95% confidence intervals from the *BEAST analysis.