Genetic differentiation in the endangered myrmecophilous butterfly Niphanda fusca: a comparison of natural and secondary habitats

Abstract

Niphanda fusca is an endangered myrmecophilous butterfly inhabiting environments at early stages of succession. Most of its habitats are places where succession is prevented by human activity. In some places, however, N. fusca lives in natural semi-bare areas, such as cliffs in mountains or grasslands around volcanos. We investigate the genetic structure of N. fusca in Japan and South Korea to address two questions. 1) Are populations in natural environments genetically different from those in secondary environments? and 2) Do populations in natural environments possess greater genetic diversity than those in secondary environments? The AMOVA results indicated that the populations in natural environments and those in secondary environments were differentiated to some extent; however, more than 80% of genetic variation was found to occur within the same habitat type and within each population. We found no differences in genetic diversity between populations in the two environments. At present, we have not found a strong reason to consider populations in the two environments as different evolutionarily significant units. We think it is practical to conserve populations in natural environments at first, because in this case we need not manage habitats to protect N. fusca. We have only to inhibit habitat destruction. In contrast, in order to conserve populations in secondary environments, we would have to continue managing the habitats. This is far more difficult than inhibiting habitat destruction.

Molecular taxonomy of Tomares hairstreaks (Lepidoptera, Lycaenidae, Theclinae)

“…Over the last decade, lycaenid butterflies have been a popular model group in studies of hybridization (Mallet et al 2011;Gillespie et al 2013;Nice et al 2013;Sakamoto and Yago 2017), sympatric and cryptic speciation (Dincă et al 2011;Vodă et al 2015;Lukhtanov et al 2015;Busby et al 2017;Bereczki et al 2018), population genomics (Gompert et al 2014;Vanden Broeck et al 2017;Chaturvedi et al 2018), chromosome evolution (Lukhtanov and Dantchenko 2017), ecological specialization (Downey and Nice 2013; Schär et al 2018) and conservation genetics (Sielezniew et al 2012;Frye and Robbins 2015;Takeuchi et al 2015;Koubínová et al 2017;Roitman et al 2017;Matthews et al 2018). Part of this popularity maybe due to the fact that lycaenids have the highest rate of protein-coding sequence evolution among butterflies (Pellissier et al 2017).…”