Professor University of Memphis Memphis, Tennessee
The informal clade Phytophaga ( >125,000 species) consists of the monophyletic sister superfamilies Chrysomeloidea (leaf and longhorn beetles) and Curculionoidea (weevils), most species of which are specialized plant- or fungus-feeders. Despite decades of study, there is limited consensus on the internal relationships within these unusually species-rich superfamilies. Published molecular phylogenies of Phytophaga have relied on just one or a few molecular markers, or have sampled a relatively small number of taxa. These studies are also missing key family and subfamily-level taxa, and recover few well-supported nodes. Recent higher-level phylogenomic studies of Chrysomeloidea and Curculionoidea are encouraging because of the large numbers of loci analyzed, and the strong nodal support recovered; however, these studies collectively sample only a subset of the subfamilies and other major lineages of Phytophaga. Thus, large parts of the internal phylogeny of Phytophaga remain incompletely resolved, and many questions about the phylogeny and evolution of Phytophaga remain unanswered. In this talk, I will summarize our current understanding of the phylogeny of Phytophaga with a particular emphasis on results from phylogenomic analyses involving more than 2,000 species from all 15 families, all 63 subfamilies, and most tribes.
