Abantiades, Herrich-Schaffer, 1855

Moore, Michael D., Beaver, Ethan P., Velasco-Castrillón, Alejandro & Stevens, Mark I., 2020, Four new tri-forked species of the Australian genus Abantiades Herrich-Schäffer (Lepidoptera: Hepialidae) from the “ dark obscura clade ”, Zootaxa 4801 (1), pp. 115-141 : 116-117

Systematics of Abantiades

Molecular analyses

The Maximum-Likelihood phylogram (Fig. 1) reveals a well supported Abantiades species groups (compared to our six outgroup taxa). The “dark A. obscura group” comprises four clades, and is sister to Abantiades obscura sensu stricto (Fig. 1). Although this is only based on the single mitochondrial COI gene, it does delineate the four new species that are also defined by distinct morphological characters (see Taxonomy section below). We found close intraspecific sequence divergences for several instances where we obtained multiple individuals within species (Supplementary Table S2). For example, the greatest intraspecific sequence divergence varied between 0.3-2.2%, indicating variation that we would expect within species included here (Supplementary Table S2). These distances also correspond directly to those reported elsewhere for Lepidoptera that indicate a maximum of between 2-3% within species comparisons using the same COI gene (e.g. Hausmann et al. 2011; Grund et al. 2019; Beaver et al. 2020; but see Simonsen et al. 2019: 796−797 for some potential caveats).

FIGURE 1. Maximum Likelihood (ML) phylogram (using TrN) based on mitochondrial DNA (COI) dataset from 68 Abantiades sequences, including the four new Abantiades species. The tree with the highest log likelihood (-2,953.03) is shown with branch lengths measured in the number of substitutions per site. Bootstrap values from 1,000 pseudoreplicates greater than 50% are shown at each node. Sequences generated from this study have been combined with GenBank sequences only when the id’s could be confirmed morphologically, and a * indicates where we have corrected a GenBank id (see Table S1).

Sequence divergence comparisons between all Abantiades species compared to our outgroup taxa were between 8.2-12.0% (Supplementary Table S2). Examining between Abantiades species in the present study reveal interspecific sequence divergences of up to 9.9% (i.e. between A. centralia sp. nov. and A. labyrinthicus (Donovan, 1805) . However, we also observed several that are on the lower end of what has been reported for related groups (see above), for example between A. hutchinsoni sp. nov. and A. zonatriticum sp. nov. (1.2%), and between A. hutchinsoni sp. nov. and A. kayi sp. nov. (1.5%) (Supplementary Table S2). Although some levels of sequence divergence are low (less than 2%) our COI phylogram for Abantiades species (Fig. 1) indicates that these are well supported species (bootstrap values> 76%), such divergence is corroborated by consistent morphological characters (see Taxonomy section below).