Out of Africa? A dated molecular phylogeny of the cicada tribe Platypleurini Schmidt (Hemiptera: Cicadidae), with a focus on African genera and the genusPlatypleuraAmyot & Audinet‐Serville

Abstract

The Platypleurini is a large group of charismatic cicadas distributed from Cape Agulhas in South Africa, through tropical Africa, Madagascar, India and eastern Asia to Japan, with generic diversity concentrated in equatorial and southern Africa. This distribution suggests the possibility of a Gondwanan origin and dispersal to eastern Asia from Africa or India. We used a four‐gene (three mitochondrial) molecular dataset, fossil calibrations and molecular clock information to explore the phylogenetic relationships of the platypleurine cicadas and the timing and geography of their diversification. The earliest splits in the tribe were found to separate forest genera in Madagascar and equatorial Africa from the main radiation, and all of the Asian/Indian species sampled formed a younger clade nested well within the African taxa. The tribe appears to have diversified during the Cenozoic, beginning c. 50–32 Ma, with most extant African lineages originating in the Miocene or later, well after the breakup of the Gondwanan landmass. Biogeographical analysis suggests an African origin for the tribe and a single dispersal event founding the Asian platypleurines, although additional taxon sampling and genetic data will be needed to confirm this pattern because key nodes in the tree are still weakly supported. Two Platypleurini genera from Madagascar (Pycna Amyot & Audinet‐Serville, Yanga Distant) are found to have originated by late Miocene dispersal of a single lineage from Africa. The genus Platypleura is recovered as polyphyletic, with Platypleura signifera Walker from South Africa and many Asian/Indian species apparently requiring assignment to different genera, and a new Platypleura concept is proposed with the synonymization of Azanicada Villet syn.n. The genera Orapa Distant and Hamza Distant, currently listed within separate tribes but suspected of platypleurine affinity, are nested deeply within the Platypleurini radiation. The tribe Orapini syn.n. is here synonymized while the tribe Hamzini is pending a decision of the ICZN to preserve nomenclatorial stability.

The cicada genus Tugelana Distant, 1912 (Hemiptera, Cicadidae): phylogenetic position and conservation status

“…1), which is physically similar (Fig. 2) and is phylogenetically placed quite deep within the African clade of Platypleura with good support from two nuclear and two mitochondrial genes (Price et al 2019).…”

“…A 627 bp fragment of the COI gene was obtained. The electropherogram showed no heterozygous peaks; there were no unexpected stop codons; and no single-or doublebase indels appeared when it was aligned with multiple sequences drawn from ten platypleurine genera selected from the Price et al (2019) data set. The sequence was therefore deemed to be of high quality.…”

“…Based on the results of the IDS and BLAST searches, homologous sequences of four gene regions (mitochondrial 16S, COI and COII, and nuclear EF1α) from the African species of Platypleura in the open-access data set of Price et al (Suppl. material 1: Table S1) were downloaded with a spectrum of African platypleurine genera to serve as outgroups (Price et al 2019). They were aligned using the ClustalW algorithm in MEGA X (Kumar et al 2018), inspected manually and trimmed so that the first nucleotides in the alignment was the first codon position (for the protein coding gene regions).…”

“…The monotypic southern African endemic genus Tugelana Distant, 1912 was first assigned to the tribe Hamzini Distant, 1904 (Distant 1914), which had only one other member, the Asian species Hamza ciliaris (Linnaeus, 1758). Based on molecular phylogenetic evidence (Price et al 2019), Hamzini was recently synonymized with Platypleurini Schmidt, 1918, which is distributed across Asia and Africa, and contains about 30 genera. Although Platypleurini is a junior synonym of Hamzaria (Marshall et al 2018), it has been conserved by conditional reversal of precedence (International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature 2020).…”

“…Although Platypleurini is a junior synonym of Hamzaria (Marshall et al 2018), it has been conserved by conditional reversal of precedence (International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature 2020). Tugelana was not included in the phylogenetic study by Price et al (2019), so its phylogenetic placement amongst this greater number of potential relatives is unclear.…”