We had almost no understanding about the patterns of relationships within the most diverse group of butterflies belonging to Nymphalidae, the subfamily Satyrinae (about 2400 species of worldwide distribution). The goal of this project was to elucidate patterns of relationships of the major groups (tribes and subtribes) and provide evidence on the relationships amongst these lineages by using phylogenetic analyses based on molecular data. This project was being developed under the supervision of Niklas Wahlberg and several collaborators.

To accomplish our goal of studying the evolution of hostplant use in this butterfly subfamily, we need to have a robust phylogenetic hypothesis for our study group. During the first stage of this project we discovered that most of the traditional classification needs to be revised, because it is reflecting unnatural groups at the tribal and subtribal level. Moreover, we found out that Satyrinae, as it is known now, might not be a monophyletic subfamily. In order to test Satyrinae's monophyly, we are working on a phylogeny for Satyrinae and related subfamilies, like Calinaginae, Charaxinae and Morphinae.

Resources

• Our dataset in TNT format is here:
• We used the software "Tree analysis using New Technology" (TNT ) for the cladistic analysis. TNT uses fast algorithms for finding trees very quickly for big datasets.
• Finding Partitioned Bremer Support (PBS) values for our cladograms was a tricky issue. We wrote a small script to automate the task in TNT. This script is just a text file named "pbsup.run" available from TNT's webpage and github .
• We used MrBayes for the Bayesian analysis.
• Pictures of vouchers used for this publication.

Publications

• Peña, C., Nylin, S., & Wahlberg, N. 2011. The radiation of Satyrini butterflies (Nymphalidae: Satyrinae): a challenge for phylogenetic methods. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 161(1): 64-87. | doi: 10.1111/j.1096-3642.2009.00627.x
• Peña, C., Nylin, S., Freitas, A.V.L. & N. Wahlberg. 2010. Biogeographic history of the butterfly subtribe Euptychiina (Lepidoptera, Nymphalidae, Satyrinae). Zoologica Scripta, 38: 243-258. | doi:10.1111/j.1463-6409.2010.00421.x
• Peña, C., & N. Wahlberg. 2008. Prehistorical climate change increased diversification of a group of butterflies. Biology Letters 4(3): 274-278. | Supplementary Material | Commentary in Telegraph | doi:10.1098/rsbl.2008.0062 |
• Peña, C., N. Wahlberg, E. Weingartner, U. Kodandaramaiah, S. Nylin, A.V.L. Freitas & A.V.Z. Brower. 2006. Higher level phylogeny of Satyrinae butterflies (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae) based on DNA sequence data. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 40(1): 29-49. | doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2006.02.007