A global phylogeny of butterflies reveals their evolutionary history, ancestral hosts and biogeographic origins
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Authors
Kawahara, Akito YStorer, Caroline
Carvalho, Ana Paula S
Plotkin, David M
Condamine, Fabien L
Braga, Mariana P
Ellis, Emily A
St Laurent, Ryan A
Li, Xuankun
Barve, Vijay
Cai, Liming
Earl, Chandra
Frandsen, Paul B
Owens, Hannah L
Valencia-Montoya, Wendy A
Aduse-Poku, Kwaku
Toussaint, Emmanuel FA
Dexter, Kelly M
Doleck, Tenzing
Markee, Amanda
Messcher, Rebeccah
Nguyen, Y-Lan
Badon, Jade Aster T
Benítez, Hugo A
Braby, Michael F
Buenavente, Perry AC
Chan, Wei-Ping
Collins, Steve C
Rabideau Childers, Richard A
Dankowicz, Even
Eastwood, Rod
Fric, Zdenek F
Gott, Riley J
Hall, Jason PW
Hallwachs, Winnie
Hardy, Nate B
Sipe, Rachel L Hawkins
Heath, Alan
Hinolan, Jomar D
Homziak, Nicholas T
Hsu, Yu-Feng
Inayoshi, Yutaka
Itliong, Micael GA
Janzen, Daniel H
Kitching, I

Kunte, Krushnamegh
Lamas, Gerardo
Landis, Michael J
Larsen, Elise A
Larsen, Torben B
Leong, Jing V
Lukhtanov, Vladimir
Maier, Crystal A
Martinez, Jose I
Martins, Dino J
Maruyama, Kiyoshi
Maunsell, Sarah C
Mega, Nicolás Oliveira
Monastyrskii, Alexander
Morais, Ana BB
Müller, Chris J
Naive, Mark Arcebal K
Nielsen, Gregory
Padrón, Pablo Sebastián
Peggie, Djunijanti
Romanowski, Helena Piccoli
Sáfián, Szabolcs
Saito, Motoki
Schröder, Stefan
Shirey, Vaughn
Soltis, Doug
Soltis, Pamela
Sourakov, Andrei
Talavera, Gerard
Vila, Roger
Vlasanek, Petr
Wang, Houshuai
Warren, Andrew D
Willmott, Keith R
Yago, Masaya
Jetz, Walter
Jarzyna, Marta A
Breinholt, Jesse W
Espeland, Marianne
Ries, Leslie
Guralnick, Robert P
Pierce, Naomi E
Lohman, David J
Issue date
2023-05-15Subject Terms
entomologyphylogenetics
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Abstract: Butterflies are a diverse and charismatic insect group that are thought to have evolved with plants and dispersed throughout the world in response to key geological events. However, these hypotheses have not been extensively tested because a comprehensive phylogenetic framework and datasets for butterfly larval hosts and global distributions are lacking. We sequenced 391 genes from nearly 2,300 butterfly species, sampled from 90 countries and 28 specimen collections, to reconstruct a new phylogenomic tree of butterflies representing 92% of all genera. Our phylogeny has strong support for nearly all nodes and demonstrates that at least 36 butterfly tribes require reclassification. Divergence time analyses imply an origin ~100 million years ago for butterflies and indicate that all but one family were present before the K/Pg extinction event. We aggregated larval host datasets and global distribution records and found that butterflies are likely to have first fed on Fabaceae and originated in what is now the Americas. Soon after the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, butterflies crossed Beringia and diversified in the Palaeotropics. Our results also reveal that most butterfly species are specialists that feed on only one larval host plant family. However, generalist butterflies that consume two or more plant families usually feed on closely related plants.Citation
Kawahara, A.Y., Storer, C., Carvalho, A.P.S. et al. A global phylogeny of butterflies reveals their evolutionary history, ancestral hosts and biogeographic origins. Nat Ecol Evol 7, 903–913 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02041-9Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLCJournal
Nature Ecology & EvolutionType
Journal ArticleItem Description
Copyright © The Author(s) 2023. This is an open access article, available to all readers online, published under a creative commons licensing (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The attached file is the published version of the article.NHM Repository
EISSN
2397-334Xae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1038/s41559-023-02041-9
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