Few insects have endeared themselves to humanity as much as have the butterflies. It's easy to see why we like them: their boldly patterned wings can be beautiful, even jewel-like, and we usually find them fluttering leisurely through hedgerows and flower gardens (and not, say, burrowing through rotting wood, or hovering over dumpsters). People have liked butterflies for a very long time, too. Many of the first entomologists ("studiers of insects") began as amateur butterfly enthusiasts. Some took on butterfly catching as a lifelong hobby, and left behind massive collections of pinned specimens accompanied by meticulous descriptions of the life stages and host plants of different species.
The bejeweléd treasure trove of knowledge that has resulted should, in theory, make butterflies the best understood of all insect clades, and ideal subjects of ecological research. Unfortunately, a lot of this information is out of reach of the broader scientific community, either gathering dust in the attics of private collections or hidden in the unturned pages of ancient field guides. What the butterflies need is a network: a cooperative online platform to collect, organize, and distribute this information to the public, free-of-charge, for use in research and science education.
To kick off the ButterflyNet project we are producing a complete species-level butterfly phylogeny, the first of any major insect clade, that will let us organize the approximately 18,800 butterfly species according to their evolutionary relationships. To each species we will then attach all available data on geographic distributions, host plant associations, and other interesting life history traits, collected and compiled from digitized field guides and online resources. When our work is done, the accumulated knowledge from centuries of observations and ongoing research will be made available through ButterflyNet to expert scientists and amateur butterfly enthusiasts alike.
For more information, take a look our NSF abstracts:
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1541557
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1541500
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1541560
We are in the process of assembling a molecular phylogeny that will reveal (once and for all) the evolutionary relationships of all 18,728 species within the butterfly superfamily Papilionoidea, as defined by van Nieukerken. To do this, we are using two types of sampling. To start, we are sampling one "exemplar" species from each butterfly genus (1815 total) extremely thoroughly. We are using a specially designed anchored hybrid enrichment probe set to target around 500 loci within the generalized butterfly genome. These 500 loci include 10 "standard" loci that have been used in butterfly phylogenetic research for many years. We will compare the sequence data we obtain from these exemplars, and use standardized measurements of genetic similarity to pin down the evolutionary relationships of all 1815 butterfly genera.
We will then map the rest of the 16,913 species in Papilionoidea onto this highly resolved phylogeny backbone. To expedite the process, we will use a second, simplified probe set to target only the 10 standard loci mentioned above: CAD, Wingless, COI, EF-1a, RpS5, RpS2, MDH, GAPDH, DDC and IDH. This will have the added benefit of allowing us to combine our results with sequence data generated from previous research on butterflies, which will let us estimate evolutionary relationships within each genus with a great deal of confidence!
Hunting butterflies used to be a fairly popular hobby, and most collectors were very good at finding them! Historical records of the "geospatial presence and absence" of different butterfly species cover large portions of the globe, and in some cases multiple centuries. In the past, researchers had to go through museums and field guides to get at this information (which would be scattered, if it was preserved at all). Recently, dedicated butterfly monitoring programs supported by citizen scientists have achieved huge increases in data influx— the only thing that's missing is a unified system of information organization.
Species distribution information is the foundation of most biodiversity research. We plan on combining the disparate sources of species occurrence data described above with modern environmental modeling techniques to produce a "Map of Butterflies," a record of previous and current species distributions supported by ongoing observations from the butterfly enthusiast community. As part of this work, we are using data and infrastructure from the Map of Life to develop maps and methods of characterizing the geographical distribution of butterfly species worldwide.
The ButterflyNet online trait data extraction and atomization database is now online! View it here: http://butterflytraits.org/
Species traits are the product of evolutionary selection, and they determine how populations function within a given ecosystem. It is interesting enough to know what types of ecological and life history traits different butterfly species have, but matching this information with our phylogeny and distribution map will give future comparative studies great weight and significance. We will be able to investigate the origins of butterfly biodiversity, explore the co-evolution of caterpillar, adult, and host plant, and predict the responses of different species to climate and land-use change.
Aduse-Poku K, Brakefield PM, Wahlberg N, Brattström O. 2017. Expanded molecular phylogeny of the genus Bicyclus (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae) shows the importance of increased sampling for detecting semi-cryptic species and highlights potentials for future studies. Systematics and Biodiversity 15: 115-130.
Aduse-Poku K, Brattstrom O, Kodandaramaiah U, Lees D, Brakefield P, Wahlberg N. 2015. Systematics and historical biogeography of the old world butterfly subtribe Mycalesina (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae: Satyrinae). BMC Evolutionary Biology 15:167.
Aduse-Poku K, Molleman F, Oduro W, Oppong SK, Lohman DJ, Etienne RS. 2018. Relative contribution of neutral and deterministic processes in shaping fruit-feeding butterfly assemblages in Afrotropical forests. Ecology and Evolution 8: 296–308.
Breinholt JW, Earl C, Lemmon AR, Lemmon EM, Xiao L, Kawahara AY. 2017. Resolving relationships among the megadiverse butterflies and moths with a novel pipeline for Anchored Phylogenomics. Systematic Biology. DOI: 10.1093/sysbio/syx048
Espeland M, Breinholt J, Willmott KR, Warren AD, Vila R, Toussaint EFA, Maunsell SC, Aduse-Poku K, Talavera G, Eastwood R, Jarzyna MA, Guralnick R, Lohman DJ, Pierce NE, Kawahara AY. 2018. A comprehensive and dated phylogenomic analysis of butterflies. Current Biology 28: 770-778.
Kawahara AY, Breinholt JW, Espeland M, Storer C, Plotkin D, Dexter KM, Toussaint EFA, St Laurent RA, Brehm G, Vargas S, Forero D, Pierce NE, Lohman DJ. 2018. Phylogenetics of moth-like butterflies (Papilionoidea: Hedylidae) based on a new 13-locus target capture probe set. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 127:600-605.
Sahoo RK, Lohman DJ, Wahlberg N, Müller CJ, Brattström O, Collins SC, Peggie D, Aduse-Poku K, Kodandaramaiah U. 2018. Evolution of Hypolimnas butterflies (Nymphalidae): Out-of-Africa origin and Wolbachia-mediated introgression. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 123: 50-58.
Tennent WJ, Vane-Wright RI, Mitchell DK, Lohman DJ. 2018. The oldest known Tiradelphe schneideri specimen discovered in a museum drawer in the Bernice P. Bishop Museum. Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society 72:327–329.
Toussaint EFA, Breinholt JW, Earl C, Warren AD, Brower AVZ, Yago M, Dexter KM, Espeland M, Pierce NE, Lohman DJ, Kawahara AY. 2018. Anchored phylogenomics illuminates the skipper butterfly tree of life. BMC Evolutionary 18:101.
Nature World News:
Scientists Trace Butterfly Evolutionary History Using DNA Advances
AAAS EurekAlert!:
Biologist David Lohman leads $2.5 million NSF-funded study on butterfly evolution
Florida Museum Pressroom:
$2.5 million NSF grant to fund online butterfly family tree, field guide
Phys.org:
At last, butterflies get a bigger, better evolutionary tree
Sci-News:
