ABSTRACT
In an age of species declines, delineating and discovering biodiversity is critical for both taxonomic accuracy and conservation. In recent years, there has been a movement away from using exclusively morphological characters to delineate and describe taxa and an increase in the use of molecular markers to describe diversity or through integrative taxonomy, which employs traditional morphological characters, as well as genetic or other data. Tiger beetles are charismatic, of conservation concern, and much work has been done on the morphological delineation of species and subspecies, but few of these taxa have been tested with genetic analyses. In this study, we tested morphologically based taxonomic hypotheses of polymorphic tiger beetles in the Eunota circumpicta (LaFerté-Sénectère, 1841) species complex using multilocus genomic and mtDNA analyses. We find multiple cryptic species within the previous taxonomic concept of Eunota circumpicta, some of which were historically recognized as subspecies. We found that the mtDNA and genomic datasets did not identify the same taxonomic units and that the mtDNA was most at odds with all other genetic and morphological patterns. Overall, we describe new cryptic diversity, which raises important conservation concerns, and provide a working example for testing species and subspecies validity despite discordant data.
Subject(s)
Coleoptera , DNA, Mitochondrial , Animals , Phylogeny , DNA, Mitochondrial/genetics , Mitochondria , Biodiversity , Coleoptera/genetics , Species SpecificityABSTRACT
The tiger beetle species, Cicindelidia aeneicollis (Bates 1881) is redescribed, as Bates original description was inadequate and did not accurately capture the character states or variation found within the species. The specific epithet aeneicollis is partially misleading as the proepisternum is mostly aeneous (bronze/copper) with the basal quarter to third being polychromatic, which the description does not convey. Some populations of this species from the western coast of Mexico exhibit significant variation in maculations, with individuals ranging from weakly marked (as in Bates description) to much more extensively marked.