Allozyme divergence and phylogenetic relationships among species of tephritid flies

Abstract

Multilocus enzyme electrophoresis data from 24 orthologous loci (212 alleles) were used to infer the genetic similarities between 11 Tephritidae pest species from the Ceratitis, Trirhithrum, Capparimyia, Bactrocera, Anastrepha and Rhagoletis genera. Within some of the considered species, different degrees of genetic variability were demonstrated, which appear to be related to zoogeography and to the biological traits peculiar to each species. Nei (1978) and Cavalli-Sforza & Edwards (1967) genetic distances were used to express the genetic divergence and to infer phylogenetic relationships among the species. The UPGMA clustering algorithm and the optimality criteria of Fitch & Margoliash (1967), with (KIT5cH) and without (FITCH) the tree constrained to have contemporary tips, were used. All the methods indicate the same clusters of species. One cluster is composed of Ceratitis capitata, Trirhithrum coffeae and Capparimyia savastanoi, another is composed of Rhagoletis cerasi, Bactrocera dorsalis and Bactrocera oleae. A further loose cluster is comprised of Ceratitis rosa and Anastrepha spp. The congruence between electrophoretic phylogeny and morphological classification is discussed. Our analysis also elucidated cases, within the Ceratitis and Bactrocera genera, of interest from the evolutionary point of view, where allozyme dendrograms do not correlate well with morphological taxonomic relationships.

Characterization and Evolution of mariner Elements from Closely Related Species of Fruit Flies (Diptera: Tephritidae)

“…High levels of genetic variability have been detected in the native populations of C. rosa and C. capitata, whereas sympatric populations of T. coffeae show very low levels of variability. These data suggest that the effective sizes of natural populations of T. coffeae are very small compared to those of C. rosa and C. capitata (Baruffi et al 1995;Malacrida et al 1996). These data are in agreement with sympatric population size estimates of these three species during the coffee season in Kenya (Mukiama 1985).…”

“…Colonization of Mauritius and Réunion by C. rosa occurred only in the 1950s (Orian and Moutia 1960), far too recently for any significant genetic differentiation to have occurred. Using allozyme polymorphism data, Malacrida et al (1996) estimated a genetic distance (Nei 1972) of only 0.048 between Kenyan and Réunion populations of this species.…”

“…These three tephritid species share the same source area, southeast Africa, where they live in sympatry, but they have different life histories and different geographic dispersion patterns (Fletcher 1989;White and Elson-Harris 1992). Sympatric native populations of C. capitata, C. rosa, and T. coffeae exhibit different degrees of genetic variability, which appears to be correlated to the zoogeography and to the biological traits of these three species (Malacrida et al 1996).…”

Globalization and fruitfly invasion and expansion: the medfly paradigm

“…In their East African home range (De Meyer et al 2002), C. rosa and C. fasciventris, like C. capitata, possess a vast reservoir of genetic variability (Malacrida et al 1996;Baliraine et al 2004). Such high variability may facilitate colonization and the establishment of new populations.…”

Exceptional Longevity in the Tephritid, Ceratitis rosa, a Close Relative of the Mediterranean Fruit Fly

“…Given that these two polyphagous species are closely related genetically (Malacrida et al 1996, Baliraine et al 2004 and have very similar behavior and ecology (Duyck et al 2006, De Meyer et al 2008), we performed a study to see if C. rosa had a long adult life span, as previously reported for C. capitata (Carey 2003). SpeciÞcally, we determined the age-speciÞc longevity of both sexes when provided different quality diets under controlled laboratory conditions.…”