Relaciones evolutivas de las mariposas monarca y sus parientes

Image by Gustavo (lu7frb) via Flickr

El colega Andrew Bower y amigos acaban de ver publicada su investigación en la filogenia y evolución de las mariposas monarca y parientes que están clasificadas en la subtribu Danaini.

Ellos han utilizado secuencias de ADN, datos morfológicos de adultos e inmaduros de estas mariposas para tratar de reconstruir la evolucion de este grupo de mariposas.

Este trabajo provee de una sólida hipótesis de la evolución de grupo, conviertiéndose en una guía de la clasificación de estas mariposas.

Los autores han estudiado mariposas de Australia, África, Indonesia, Islas Grand Caimán, Argentina, Tailandia, USA, Republica Dominicana, Brasil y una especie de Perú: la especie Danaus plexippus de Tingo María.

Brower, A.V., Wahlberg, N., Ogawa, J.R., Boppré, M. & Vane-Wright, R.I. (2010) Phylogenetic relationships among genera of danaine butterflies (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae) as implied by morphology and DNA sequences. Systematics and Biodiversity, 8, 75-89. doi:10.1080/14772001003626814

Moving to Flickr

Image via CrunchBase

All the voucher pictures in our NSG database take up to 2.5GB in hard disk space, which is quite a lot for 3300 pictures only.

This is indeed a problem if we decide to move the database into a private, commercial server because buying 2.5 GB of space can be quite expensive.

Then Flickr might be able to help. By having a PRO account, users are allowed to upload unlimited number of photos and even retaining the original sizes of high resolution photos, for only 25 USD per year. Quite a bargain indeed.

Since moving more than 3000 pictures can be tiresome, I used used Flickr's API interface and grabbed an API key.

Then I found the PHP class libraries of Phlickr very useful as a layer on top of Flickr's API.

I used Phlickr to harvest information from the NSG database and included it as Title, description and Tags of the photos to be uploaded to Flickr.

Almost everything worked as a charm. However, I found that Phlickr got problems in getting the image URL, by constructing the link using the wrong id of the photo. I had to fix it by hacking the Photo.php class -> function buildImgUrl()

The database then will link to the photo on Flickr:



Now people can comment on every picture and point out whenever we misidentify the vouchers. The possibility of adding notes on top of the photo might of some use.

NSG's photostream in Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nsg_db/

New butterfly from Colombia

Blanca Huertas and colleagues (Huertas, Ríos & Le Crom, 2009) describe a new Satyrinae butterfly in the genus Splendeuptychia from the Colombian Andes:

Splendeuptychia ackeryi Huertas, Ríos & Le Crom, 2009

This is the original citation:

Huertas, Blanca; Ríos, Cristóbal; Le Crom, Jean F. (2009) A new species of Splendeuptychia from the Magdalena Valley in Colombia (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae: Satyrinae). Zootaxa 2014: 51–58.

see the paper here.

It seems this butterfly was found due to having particular mustache.

from ScienceDaily

from taxon_db

Search function for Taxonomic database

I just uploaded the search function for the Butterfly Taxonomic Database:

http://www.nymphalidae.net/taxon_db/search.php



The search field can take up to three arguments of butterfly names (no matter whether you enter genus or species names), and the script will look for genus and species names that will match your query.

For example a search for the species Euptychia enyo will output this taxon but also all other Euptychia and even Corades enyo:



Still have to get rid of the duplicates like the second Euptychia enyo at the bottom of the returned results.

Taxonomic database

In order to keep track of the ever changing butterfly names, we are working on a "Taxonomic database" for butterfly names.

Here:
http://www.nymphalidae.net/taxon_db/

We are generating LSIDs for each butterfly name, including basic info such as the original combination of names from primary literature, list of synonyms and/or homonyms if they exits, type localities, some collection localities and a map when suitable.

We are working on generating RDF files for keeping this info readable for computers as well.

So far we have made available a checklist function for reporting species names according to Biogeographic region and family-level classification. We are on the works to finish up the search function.

Global climate change is good for butterflies

Sort of off-topic, though.

Our paper: Peña & Wahlberg (2008) Prehistorical climate change increased diversification of a group of butterflies. Biology Letters; is coming out today (probably, at least online). However, it already got a short note on London's Telegraph (here).
Here is the doi link: 10.1098/rsbl.2008.0062
and here links to the PDFs: http://nymphalidae.utu.fi/publi.htm

From the abstract:

Satyrinae butterflies (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae) and grasses (Poaceae) are very diverse and distributed worldwide. Most Satyrinae use grasses as hostplants, but the temporal scale of this tight association has been unknown. Here we present a phylogenetic study of Satyrinae butterflies and related groups, based on 5.1 kilobases from six gene regions and 238 morphological characters for all major lineages in the “satyrine clade”. Estimates of divergence times calibrated using a fossil from Late Oligocene indicate that the species rich tribe Satyrini diversified to its current 2,200 species simultaneously with the expansion and radiation of grasses during the dramatic cooling and drying up of the Earth in the Oligocene. We suggest that the adaptive radiation of grass feeders in Satyrini was facilitated by the ubiquitousness of grasses since 25 Mya, which was triggered by a change in global climate.