Scientists from the Florida Museum of Natural History and elsewhere have 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. They’ve found that butterflies are likely to have first fed on flowering plants from the Fabaceae (legume, pea, or bean) family and originated in what is now the Americas.
“This was a childhood dream of mine,” said lead author Dr. Akito Kawahara, curator of lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
“It’s something I’ve wanted to do since visiting the American Museum of Natural History when I was a kid and seeing a picture of a butterfly phylogeny taped to a curator’s door.”
“It’s also the most difficult study I’ve ever been a part of, and it took a massive effort from people all over the world to complete.”
There are some 19,000 butterfly species, and piecing together the 100 million-year history of the group required information about their modern distributions and host plants.
Prior to this study, there was no single place that researchers could go to access that type of data.
“In many cases, the information we needed existed in field guides that hadn’t been digitized and were written in various languages,” Dr. Kawahara said.
Undeterred, the study authors decided to make their own, publicly available database, painstakingly translating and transferring the contents of books, museum collections and isolated web pages into a single digital repository.
Underlying all these data were 11 rare butterfly fossils, without which the analysis would not have been possible.
With paper-thin wings and threadlike, gossamer hairs, butterflies are rarely preserved in the fossil record.
The few that are can be used as calibration points on genetic trees, allowing researchers to record timing of key evolutionary events.
The results tell a dynamic story — one rife…
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