Evolution and diversification dynamics of butterflies

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

2:54 PM – 3:06 PM PT

Location: Vancouver Convention Centre, Meeting Room 212

Presenting Author(s)

Akito Y. Kawahara

Associate Curator
University of Florida
Gainesville, Florida

Co-Author(s)

AC

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

Postdoc
University of Florida
Gainesville, Florida
DP

David Plotkin

Project Manager, Kawahara Lab
University of Florida
Gainesville, Florida
RS

Ryan A. St Laurent (he/him/his)

Postdoctoral Fellow
Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History
Washington, District of Columbia
Xuankun Li

Post Doc Associate
University of Memphis
Memphis, Tennessee
CE

Chandra Earl

Bernice P. Bishop Museum
Honolulu, Hawai'i
ET

Emmanuel Toussaint

Natural History Museum of Geneva
Geneva, Geneve, Switzerland
Amanda Markee

Graduate Student
Florida Museum of Natural History
Gainesville, Florida
NP

Naomi Pierce

Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
DL

David J. Lohman

University of New York
New York, New York

Butterflies are a diverse and charismatic insect group that are thought to have diversified via coevolution with plants and in response to dispersals following key geological events. These hypotheses have been poorly tested at the macroevolutionary scale because a comprehensive phylogenetic framework and datasets on global distributions and larval hosts of butterflies are lacking. We sequenced 391 genes from nearly 2,000 butterfly species to construct a new, phylogenomic tree of butterflies representing 92% of all genera and aggregated global distribution records and larval host datasets. We found that butterflies likely originated in what is now the Americas, ~100 Ma, shortly before the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, then crossed Beringia and diversified in the Paleotropics. The ancestor of modern butterflies likely fed on Fabaceae, and most extant families were present before the K/Pg extinction. The majority of butterfly dispersals occurred from the tropics (especially the Neotropics) to temperate zones, largely supporting a “cradle” pattern of diversification. Surprisingly, host breadth changes and shifts to novel host plants had only modest impacts.