Phylogenomics Illuminates the Evolutionary History of Wild Silkmoths in Space and Time (Lepidoptera: Saturniidae)

Abstract

Wild silkmoths (Saturniidae) are one of the most emblematic and most studied families of moths. Yet, the absence of a robust phylogenetic framework based on a comprehensive taxonomic sampling impedes our understanding of their evolutionary history. We analyzed 1,024 ultraconserved elements (UCEs) and their flanking regions to infer the relationships among 338 species of Saturniidae representing all described subfamilies, tribes, and genera. We investigated systematic biases in genomic data and performed dating and historical biogeographic analyses to reconstruct the evolutionary history of wild silkmoths in space and time. Using Gene Genealogy Interrogation, we showed that saturation of nucleotide sequence data blurred our understanding of early divergences and first biogeographic events. Our analyses support a Neotropical origin of saturniids, shortly after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event (ca 64.0 [stem] - 52.0 [crown] Ma), and two independent colonization events of the Old World during the Eocene, presumably through the Bering Land Bridge. Early divergences strongly shaped the distribution of extant subfamilies as they showed very limited mobility across biogeographical regions, except for Saturniinae, a subfamily now present on all continents but Antarctica. Overall, our results provide a framework for in-depth investigations into the spatial and temporal dynamics of all saturniid lineages and for the integration of their evolutionary history into further global studies of biodiversity and conservation. Rather unexpectedly for a taxonomically well-known family such as Saturniidae, the proper alignment of taxonomic divisions and ranks with our phylogenetic results leads us to propose substantial rearrangements of the family classification, including the description of one new subfamily and two new tribes.

The Chalcidoidea bush of life – a massive radiation blurred by mutational saturation

“…The combined IQ-TREE tree (partitioning by data type) was used as the input tree. Five data sets, each composed of 10,000 amino acid sites randomly selected (custom script in Rougerie et al 2022) from the exonsAA partition + 10,000 nucleotide sites randomly selected from the UCEs90-25 partition, were used as sequence data to make computation tractable. Each data set was partitioned into two partitions exonsAA (WAG+G model) and UCEs (GTR+G model).…”

A New Dryocampa Species (Saturniidae: Ceratocampinae) from the Hill Country of Texas: Not Everything in Texas is Big

“…As suggested by both Ferguson (1971) and Lemaire (1988), Dryocampa is most closely related to Anisota . Molecular data strongly support their sister group relationship (Rougerie et al 2022). Both genera have the saccular portion of the valve curving inward; the valve apex is bifid with a strongly melanized lower lobe; and the uncus is deeply emarginate, with each lobe bearing a sclerotized (and strongly melanized) patch or ridge, along its ventral surface.…”

Phylogeny and divergence time estimation of Io moths and relatives (Lepidoptera: Saturniidae:Automeris)

“…Recently, Rougerie et al (2022) reconstructed a phylogeny of Saturniidae, which was the only modern analysis providing a hypothesis of relationships of Automeris, Leucanella, Pseudoautomeris and Molippa . We find general congruence with the relationships uncovered by Rougerie et al (2022), although Automeris is paraphyletic our study contained more species of Automeris included in the analysis.…”

“…The topology generated from the PF dataset in IQTREE was used, given the higher bootstrap values when compared to the Probe dataset. However, when running BEAST using the PF dataset for dating, the resulting 95% confidence intervals were disproportionately small, indicating the high likelihood that the large dataset caused the underlying Bayesian analysis to become easily stuck at a local minima (Kawahara et al 2019; Rougerie et al 2022). Due to this, we ultimately chose to use the Probe dataset for dating.…”