The lady's maid butterfly, Vanessula milca (Hewitson (1873)), features blackish-brown wings with a distinctive deep orange discal band. It has been observed in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, C & ocirc;te d'Ivoire, and eastern Nigeria. Typically found in hilly regions at elevations above 800 meters, the geographic distribution of this butterfly is patchy, suggesting its larval host plants are likely quasi-montane. Now classified as a nymphalid, V. milca is quite distinctive, with apparently no extant closely related taxa and uncertain phylogenetic affinities. Using Illumina sequencing for genome skimming allowed the assembly of a complete circular mitogenome of 15,314 bp for V. milca. This genome consists of 80.2% AT nucleotides, 13 protein-coding genes, 22 tRNAs, 2 rRNAs, and a control region, following the gene order typically found in butterflies. Notably, the COX1 gene of V. milca starts with an atypical codon (CGA), while COX2, ND2, ND4, ND5, CYTB, and ATP6 display incomplete stop codons finished by the addition of a poly-A tail to the mRNA. The nuclear ribosomal RNA repeat sequence, which is 8,819 base pairs long, was also assembled. It contains three rRNA subunits (18S, 5.8S, and 28S), two internal transcribed spacers (ITS1 and ITS2), as well as non-transcribed spacers at the 5'and 3' ends. A Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of complete mitochondrial genomes places V. milca as the sister taxon to Kallimoides rumia, though this relationship may be influenced by long-branch attraction, contributing to their uncertain taxonomic and phylogenetic affinities. Phylogenetic analysis of the nuclear rRNA repeat, did not recover the same sister relationship between V. milca and K. rumia. This difference may be due to evolutionary discordance between nuclear and mitochondrial genomes, or it may be due to limitations of the genetic variation found in the nuclear ribosomal RNA repeat sequence. Given these uncertainties and the unique features of V. milca, we propose to assign it to its own monotypic nymphalid tribe: Vanessulini.
This paper expands our current understanding of Hemaris aethra by adding multiple new records of this species from further south than previously reported including Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Additionally a full life history is presented, along with illustrating a novel color morph of the larva.
Eucosma johnsoni, sp. n., is described from the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona, and Eucosma paiuteana, sp. n., is described from northeastern California. Diagnostic character states distinguishing members of the Eucosma corculana and Eucosma pastigiata species groups are reviewed.
Accurate and non-destructive field identification of the recently separated Hermeuptychia sosybius and H. intricata is integral in determining key life history differences and assessments of population trends. While distinguishing these species is possible through external features, the utility of these features as field marks warrants further investigation involving individuals with wing wear or atypical phenotype. Our objectives were to 1) assess whether three postmedian line (PML) features are reliable identifying characteristics for accurately differentiating the two species in the field, and 2) determine if adult flight-time differences between the two species could additionally inform field identification. In a double-blind survey, five panelists correctly identified 63.73% of individuals (n = 91), with four individual satyrs misidentified by all panelists. Both the generalized linear mixed model (GLMM; logit link) and the ensemble random forest model indicated that the hindwing M1vein feature best predicted correct identifications to species and was the most important variable compared to the forewing M1 vein and hindwing M3 vein features. We also found further evidence of substantial overlap in flight time between both species. Our results indicate that accurate field identification of these species, when co-occurring at a locality, are imperfect. Habitat, time of year, and PML features should be considered collectively, as opposed to using any one of them separately. Depending on the objectives of a particular survey, observers should be conservative in their identifications and avoid definitive identifications when few individuals are present, unless male androconia patches are observed.
Urbanization has reshaped landscapes worldwide and is known to strongly impact biodiversity. Butterflies are useful ecological indicators of urbanization because of their short lifespans, diverse habitat requirements, and sensitivity to temperature and microclimates.Butterfly gardens provide habitat patches within urbanized landscapes by including both larval hostplants and adult nectar plants, and thus are regularly recommended as a conservation action. To evaluate the effectiveness of butterfly gardens as urban conservation tools, it is essential to understand the dynamics of butterfly colonization and community change overtime. To better understand how butterfly communities respond to different stages of urban gardens we examined three complementary datasets from gardens at the Oklahoma City Zoo and Botanical Garden. Butterflies were detected immediately post garden planting but after 28 survey weeks community diversity differed with landscape context: the garden adjacent to a woody-shrub habitat accumulated more species and individuals than the garden embedded in an impervious surface matrix. Species richness was similar among gardens, but butterfly community compositions remained distinct, with some overlap observed in newly established gardens during the first summer post-planting. Finally, butterfly communities were distinctly separate by time period with beta diversity driven primarily by species turnover rather than species nestedness. Together these complementary results highlight that butterfly gardens can make meaningful conservation contributions, but their success is strongly dependent on both context and time. Further studies are needed to determine how plant selection, weather variability, seasonal timing, and position within the surrounding landscape matrix influence colonization trajectories and long-term butterfly community dynamics.
The female Taiwancylis cladodium Razowski, 2000 is described for the first time. Images of adults and genitalia of both sexes are provided and described. A further distribution record in Taiwan is also documented. The systematic position of the monotypic genus, Taiwancylis Razowski, 2000, is discussed.
. A moth community of 162 species in semi-desert rangelands of central Oregon was studied over two years with respect to the effects of fire disturbance and seasonal weather variation. This community was comprised of 10 distinct guilds based upon larval foodplants and larval feeding habits. These included guilds based upon woody shrubs such as junipers, sagebrush, rabbitbrush, and bitterbrush, plus native bunchgrasses, general grasses, herbaceous plants, and lichens. Larvae feeding on herbs were further divided into climbing cutworms, soil-surface feeding cutworms, and burrowing cutworms. Fire disturbance had a negative impact on the guilds using woody vegetation and native bunchgrasses, and also the climbing cutworms. General grassfeeders increased in abundance, while soil-surface cutworms were not affected in general abundance. However, individual species exhibited wide fluctuations in abundance due to fire disturbance. Drastic fluctuations were also observed with seasonal weather variation, and some individual species either experienced population explosions or crashes, while other species remained unaffected by weather variation. The lichen feeding guild was mostly absent from the community during the dry year of 2009, but experienced large increases in abundance during the wet year of 2011. In general, the guilds feeding on woody shrubs and herbaceous vegetation all showed large increases in abundance during 2011. However, the geometrid moths of the genus Digrammia were most abundant during 2009, and all showed decreases in 2011. Fire disturbance and interannual weather variation had strong effects on the moth community dynamics, which would likely affect higher trophic levels, in particular numerous species of birds and mammals, that depend on them for a food source.
Orgyia is among the most familiar, destructive, and medically important North American moth genera, yet because of great infraspecific variability, the overlapping nature of adult phenotypes, and limited genitalic differentiation, four western North American species-O. cana, O. magna, O. pseudotsugata, and O. vetusta-remain intermixed in collections, genetic databases, and on online taxonomic resources. Here we use larval characters, DNA barcodes, host associations, and geographic data to clarify the species-level taxonomy of the ten Orgyia species that occur north of Mexico. We provide a larval key, brief diagnoses, and images of last instars for each species, including the first barcode confirmed larval images of O. magna and O. vetusta. The latter taxon is narrowly restricted to the immediate coast of Central California. Beginning with Harrison Dyar in 1896, O. vetusta has been erroneously applied to inland records of Orgyia. In addition to correcting the taxonomy for the western species, we identify remaining taxonomic uncertainties and geographic data gaps, comment on the population dynamics and pest status of many Orgyia, draw attention to the association of lymantriines with coastal communities, and provide a brief summary of lepidopteran taxa for which larval characters helped correct the species-level taxonomy of a genus.
Climate change is affecting insects across the globe. Here, we examined how meteorological conditions during the adult flight season of the alpine butterfly, Parnassius smintheus affected estimates of survival using mark-release-recapture methods. We compiled meteorological and survival data from two large, contiguous populations for 10 years between 2011 and 2022. Over this period, we found an increase in mean photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) and mean temperature during the markrecapture interval. Despite these patterns there was no relationship between PAR, rainfall, relative humidity, and mean, minimum or maximum temperature, and apparent survival. We also found no interactions between rainfall and maximum or mean temperature on survival. Similarly, we found that the loss rate (due to either mortality or emigration) among all 17 subpopulations along Jumpingpound Ridge, Kananaskis Country, Alberta, Canada was unrelated to any meteorological condition. Our results indicate that adult P. smintheus are resilient to meteorological conditions experienced during their flight season over the last decade. Survival estimates are similar to those estimated for many other Parnassius species.
. The hope that DNA barcoding would accelerate the documentation of biodiversity has materialized with mixed implications for the discipline of taxonomy. Of concern is the conflation in the taxonomic literature of two of the main goals of DNA barcoding: species discovery and diagnosis. Recent taxonomic work in the saturniid genus Arsenura, offers an example of the potential for overreliance on the barcode, and the resulting proliferation of species names without assessing the reliability of COI for either species discovery or diagnosis. Because the use of barcodes in taxonomy is likely to grow, we explored its performance as a diagnostic tool in Arsenura based on a dataset of 468 individual barcodes, specifically by estimating genetic distances within and between species to assess the existence of a barcoding gap. Parsimony-generated trees-interpreted as summaries of character state distributions-of 170 unique barcode haplotypes were compared to BIN clusters generated with neighbor joining in BOLD. We found a considerable overlap between intraspecific and interspecific genetic distances. The latter were as low as 0.8%, while more than 33% of intraspecific comparisons showed greater than 2% divergence, and 21% exceeded 3%, together demonstrating the lack of a barcoding gap in the genus, the criterion for robust species recognition used by BOLD. Although in some instances NJ analysis oversplits relative to parsimony, parsimony analyses of barcodes allow us to determine that 92% of BOLD's BINs are supported by nucleotide character states, and that conspecific barcodes are successfully recognized as such. Two exceptions involved samples of A. jennettae and A. aspasia, in which barcodes lacked diagnostic characters and thus failed to distinguish them from A. armida and A. biundulata, respectively. Given the lack of a barcoding gap and the somewhat inconsistent performance of neighbor-joining BINs in reflecting diagnosable entities, we caution against over-reliance on genetic distances as arbiters of the taxonomic choices. Barcodes should ideally be corroborated by morphological, behavioral, or geographical differences. Finally, we call attention to the need for adequate sampling to ensure the broadest possible representation of intraspecific diversity in analyses and stress the importance of transparent, empirically sound interpretations of character data.
We provide a status review of Calephelis muticum (Swamp Metalmark) in North America and document a large population of the species at the Runge Conservation Nature Center in Central Missouri. The species is scattered on man-made openings, restored prairie edges, and semi-shaded stream corridors within a semi-shaded oak, persimmon, cherry, eastern red cedar, and walnut woodland. The larval host plant at the site is Cirsium altissimum (tall thistle). Monitoring of Calephelis muticum at the site between 2021 and 2024 ranged from a low of 2.68 individuals per observer hour in 2023 to a high of 7.08 individuals per observer hour in 2024. Genetic analyses eliminated potential confusion with Calephelis borealis (Northern Metalmark) which occurs in similar habitat in a few counties scattered across Missouri. Ongoing management and restoration efforts through prescribed fire, removal of red cedar, and control of non-native species will enable the population to expand and persist at the site. Based on our observations, we recommend that surveys for Calephelis muticum at upland sites throughout North America with appropriate host plants be undertaken. Due to threats faced by Calephelis muticum elsewhere in North America, the species is possibly a candidate for federal listing under the Endangered Species Act.
. Comparison of dorsal wing features in populations of the viceroy butterfly (Limenitis archippus) from throughout its wide range in North America, together with molecular analysis of publicly available mitochondrial DNA barcodes, reveal that the subspecies from southwestern USA and northwestern Mexico, the Arizona viceroy L. a. obsoleta, shows diagnostic differences from all other populations that merit its elevation to a full species, L. obsoleta stat. rev. A brief review of the taxonomic history, ecology and potential conservation issues with the Arizona viceroy is provided.
. Parnassius clodius, a Snow Apollo butterfly species native to western North America, overwinters as pharate firstinstar larvae enclosed within the chorion. Different populations can experience vastly different overwintering temperatures, which are influenced on a microclimatic scale by both snowpack depth and air temperature. Higher elevation populations are likely to experience more moderate overwintering temperatures than lower elevation populations due to the generally greater snowpack volume and stability at higher elevations. Thus, I hypothesized that higher elevation populations would exhibit reduced cold tolerance compared to lower elevation populations, reflected in a higher average egg supercooling point. The results showed that the high elevation population had a supercooling point 0.61 degrees C warmer than that of the low elevation population (F test, F-1,F-48 = 10.38, P = 0.0023). This pattern supports the hypothesis that overwintering pharate larvae in high elevation populations are less coldtolerant than their low elevation counterparts and highlights the potential for increased overwintering mortality at high elevations with reduced snowpack under climate change.
It has been hypothesized that the butterfly Graphium weiskei goodenovii should be reassigned the name Graphium kosii based on certain wing characteristics. However, this suspicion remains unconfirmed, perhaps due to the extreme difficulty of obtaining the former butterfly species for examination. In the present study, we performed DNA sequence analysis on Graphium weiskei goodenovii, Graphium kosii gigantor and Graphium kosii kosii to study this unclarified taxonomic matter; there has been no previous DNA analysis of G. weiskei goodenovii and G. kosii kosii. The DNA of the G. weiskei goodenovii sample we acquired was in very poor condition, so we performed a specialized PCR involving a series of PCRs that amplify four brief COI regions (approximately 180 to 240 bp), to obtain a full barcode sequence. Analysis of the sequences obtained, including phylogenetic trees constructed, produced two results. First, the DNA sequence identity analysis among the traditional gelon group taxa, i.e., G. weiskei goodenovii, Graphium weiskei weiskei, Graphium kosii gigantor, and Graphium kosii kosii, supported the traditional concept that G. weiskei goodenovii and Graphium weiskei weiskei were the same species. Specifically, the percentage difference between G. weiskei weiskei and G. weiskei goodenovii was 1.06%, whereas the differences between G. weiskei goodenovii and the two above subspecies of G. kosii, as well as those between G. weiskei weiskei and those two subspecies, were between 2% and 3%. Second, the percentage differences in ND5 sequences between G. weiskei weiskei and those two kosii subspecies were unexpectedly small, at 1.04% each. In addition, the COI phylogenetic trees did not clearly support that G. weiskei and G. kosii are different species. Therefore, these results indicate the taxonomic classification that G. weiskei and G. kosii are different species may not be definitive. Further studies, including cross-fertilization experiments, may produce new insights into this taxonomic matter.
