Evolution of sulfur and white butterflies reveals correlations of speciation with global temperature

On-Demand

Presenting Author(s)

AC

Ana P. S. Carvalho (she/her/hers)

Postdoc
University of Florida
Gainesville, Florida

Co-Author(s)

HO

Hannah L. Owens

University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, Hovedstaden, Denmark
Akito Y. Kawahara

Associate Curator
University of Florida
Gainesville, Florida
DL

David J. Lohman

University of New York
New York, New York

Global temperature has been hypothesized to be a primary factor that drives patterns of species richness and biodiversity. Most studies that have sought to test this hypothesis have focused on vertebrates, while disproportionally less attention has been given to the megadiverse insects. Butterflies are one of the insect groups with the greatest amount of distributional data. Among butterflies, Pieridae are an especially important family that has a distribution that ranges from the tropics to the arctic. Here we combine a robust phylogenetic reconstruction of Pieridae with high-quality distribution data to test the relationship between diversification rates and temperature. Our phylogeny was inferred with Anchored Hybrid Enrichment and published GenBank sequences, summing to 593 Pieridae species, amounting to 51% of pierid species richness, a six-fold increase in taxon sampling from the previous phylogenetic study. Our tree shows strong support for all previously hypothesized subfamilial relationships except for the placement of Pseudopontiinae. We also compiled and curated over 800,000 occurrence records for these species from GBIF, which were used to extract temperature-related information from the WorldClim dataset. We found significant evidence that species in environments with more stable daily temperatures or with cooler maximum temperatures in the warm seasons have higher diversification rates. Although many studies demonstrate higher diversity in the tropics, we have been able to identify specific climate variables associated with changes in diversification, while also inferring the most robust and well sampled phylogenomic framework for Pieridae to date.