Tag: taxonomy

Single no more: First females of a Madagascan chameleon described with modern technologies

The first females of a scarcely known chameleon species from Northeast Madagascar have been described. Because of lack of genetic data, X-ray micro-computed tomography scans of the chameleon’s head were used for species assignment. Regrettably, the habitats of this and many other chameleon species are highly threatened by the ongoing deforestation in Madagascar. The study is published in the open-access journal Zoosystematics and Evolution.

Chameleons belong to the most popular animals of Madagascar and have been quite intensively studied in the past. However, many new species are still being discovered and described, and several species are only known by a single or a few specimens. Likewise, the chameleon species Calumma vatosoa from northeastern Madagascar was described in 2001 based on a single male. The identity of females of this species has been unclear until now.

Recently, the PhD student David Proetzel of the herpetology section of the Zoologische Staatssammlung Munchen (ZSM), Germany, found specimens of female chameleons in the collection of the Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, that looked similar to Calumma vatosoa. The problem was, how to prove this? The specimens from Frankfurt were collected back in 1933 and therefore, the extraction of DNA for genetic analysis was not possible anymore.

Researchers of the ZSM have been using X-ray micro-computed tomography scans for a few years to study the internal morphology of organisms in a non-invasive way.

“With the help of Micro-CT you can investigate even the skeleton of very valuable samples like holotypes without destroying them,” explains David Proetzel.

“In chameleons the morphology of the skeleton, especially the skull, contains important characteristics that distinguish different species,” explains the researcher. “Here, the comparison of the skulls of the male and the female showed that they belong to the same chameleon species. With the help of modern technology we could describe females of Calumma vatosoa for the first time, and add another distribution locality of this species.”

“The habitats of many chameleon species, and not only, are highly threatened by the ongoing deforestation in Madagascar and we need rapidly to expand our knowledge about the biodiversity, so that suitable conservation measures can be taken,” he stresses.

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Original source:

Proetzel D, Ruthensteiner B, Glaw F (2016) No longer single! Description of female Calumma vatosoa (Squamata, Chamaeleonidae) including a review of the species and its systematic position. Zoosystematics and Evolution, 92 (1): 13-21. doi: 10.3897/zse.92.6464

The lizard of consistency: New iguana species which sticks to its colors found in Chile

During a field trip at 3000 metres above sea level, a group of scientists, led by Jaime Troncoso-Palacios, Universidad de Chile, discovered a new endemic iguana species, in the mountains of central Chile, scientists. Noticeably different in size and scalation, compared to the rest of the local lizards, what initially grabbed the biologists’ attention was its colouration. Not only was it unlike the already described ones, but also appeared surprisingly consistent within the collected individuals, even regardless of their sex. Eventually, it was this peculiar uniformity that determined the lizard’s name L. uniformis. The study is published in the open-access journal ZooKeys.

The researchers found the lizards quite abundant in the area, which facilitated their observations and estimations. Apart from a thorough description of the new iguana along with its comparisons to its related species, the present paper also provides an in-depth discussion about the placement of the new taxon, which had been confused with other species in the past.

While most of the other lizards from the area and its surroundings often vary greatly in colouration and pattern between populations and sexes, such thing is not present in the new species. Both males and females from the observed collection have their bodies’ upper side in brown, varying from dark on the head, through coppery on the back and light brown on the tail. The down side of the body is mainly yellowish, while the belly – whitish. The only variables the scientists have noticed in their specimens are slight differences in the shade with two females demonstrating unusual olive hues on their snouts. These differences in morphology were also strongly supported by the molecular phylogeny through the analysis of mitochondrial DNA, which was performed by Dr. Alvaro A. Elorza, from Universidad Andres Bello.

Accustomed to life in highland rocky habitats with scarce greenery, these lizards spend their active hours, estimated to take place between 09:00 h and 18:00 h hidden under stones. However, they might not be too hard to find due to their size of about 8.5 cm for the males and their abundance in the studied area. The females are more slender and measure 7 cm in length on average.

Having caught one of their specimens while holding a yellow flower in its mouth, the scientists conducted further examination of the stomach contents of the studied individuals and concluded that the species is omnivorous, feeding mainly on plants as well as insects and roundworms.

In conclusion, the researchers showed that there is still a huge gap in the knowledge of the close relatives of the newly described species and their “challenging taxonomy”.

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Original source:

Troncoso-Palacios J, Elorza AA, Puas GI, Alfaro-Pardo E (2016) A new species of Liolaemusrelated to L. nigroviridis from the Andean highlands of Central Chile (Iguania, Liolaemidae).ZooKeys 555: 91-114. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.555.6011

The tip of an iceberg: Four new fungus gnat species from the Scandinavian north

One may think that the extreme north of Europe is low in insect life, except for the notorious blood-sucking flies. However, while it is a generally accepted truth that both plant and animal species’ count is higher the closer one gets to the Equator, some insects display anomalous diversity gradient. Such is the case for European fungus gnats, for example, a highly diverse group of true flies. No less than about 1000 species are known to occur in the Scandinavian Peninsula, representing about 83% of the continent’s total. Furthermore, undescribed fly species are continuously being discovered from North Europe.

In a recent paper published in Biodiversity Data Journal, four new species are described. These species have been collected from mires and old-growth forests of Finnish Lapland between 2012 and 2014. One of the species has a wider range, known from Sweden, Norway and Canada.

‘I must admit that it was a pleasure to give names to these species’ says Dr. Jukka Salmela, conservation biologist at Parks & Wildlife Finland (Metsahallitus). ‘These four species are really interesting, because they are rather distant to other known members of the genus Boletina. I am also confident that these species are very rare and may be dependent on old-growth forests or small water bodies such as springs and wetlands.’

The names of the new species all reflect northern nature in one way or another. Boletina valteri is named after Professor Valter Keltikangas, a forest researcher who made very demanding and physically tough field excursions to Finnish Lapland in the 1920’s and the ’30’s.

Boletina kullervoi derives from Kalevala, a Finnish national epic. It tells the story of an orphan, called Kullervo, who eventually kills his foster father and commits suicide. The violent story of Kullervo has also inspired composer Jean Sibelius for his first symphony, “Kullervo”.

Boletina hyperborea is self-explanatory, meaning far north. The species occurs in Yukon and in northern Scandinavia. Similarly, Boletina nuortti is named after the River Nuortti. In north Sami language nuorti means east. The gorgeous and wild River Nuortti flows from Finland to Russia.

No less than 100 Fennoscandian (Scandinavian) fungus gnat species await their formal description. ‘The boreal and Arctic nature still holds many secrets. Entomologists with simple gear such as sweep nets, Malaise traps and microscopes can still make notable discoveries even in rather well-studied regions such as Finland and Sweden. Samples collected from northern mires and boreal forests are never boring if one studies neglected groups such as small flies,’ says Jukka Salmela. “These four newly described taxa just represent a small fraction of the numerous undescribed northern fly species, so they are like a tip of an iceberg.”

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Original source:

Salmela J, Suuronen A, Kaunisto K (2016) New and poorly known Holarctic species of Boletina Staeger, 1840 (Diptera, Mycetophilidae). Biodiversity Data Journal 4: e7218. doi:10.3897/BDJ.4.e7218

1,541 snout moth species and counting in the United States and Canada

The present snout moth list contains a ten-percent increase in the number of species since 1983. For the last thirty-three years snout moth specialists in the United States and Canada have been describing species new to science and recording species new to these two countries. Scientists have also published studies resulting in major changes to the classification above the species level, for example by studying snout moth “ears” (tympanal organs) and utilizing genes to study their relationships.

This check list was compiled over a three-year period by Dr. Brian Scholtens and Dr. M. Alma Solis. Brian Scholtens is a professor at the College of Charleston, South Carolina, and M. Alma Solis is a research entomologist at the Agriculture Research Service’s Systematic Entomology Laboratory, and curator of the U.S. National Pyraloidea Collection located at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C. Their results have been published in the open-access journal ZooKeys.

“A check list is one of the most important pieces of research, with many applications,” says Dr. Solis. “Knowing the fauna of a geographic area makes it possible to track species and, in this case, potential invasive species. The caterpillars of snout moths are economically important worldwide as pests of planted crops for food or biofuel, of forest trees, and of stored products such as wheat and nuts.”

“Many species, for example, the stored product pests, occur worldwide, but others, such as pest species of grasses including corn, can be restricted or only exist in certain geographic areas,” the scientist further explains. “It is important to be able to recognize as soon as possible that a particular species is not native to the United States or Canada.”

Scientists use Latin scientific names as “unique tags” to communicate about the morphological or molecular identity and habits of a species. One of the functions of taxonomists is to determine if a species is new or if it has already been described. Historically, confusion is created when the same species is described more than once (called a synonym) in other parts of the world.

A regional check list such as this one and a worldwide check list can work together to reinforce precision in the definition and communication about species, especially decreasing confusion about synonyms. Most worldwide check lists exist as online databases that can be updated. Dr. Solis said that they had cited new discoveries relevant to the North American snout moth fauna found in GLOBIZ, or the Global Information System on Pyraloidea, an electronic list of over 15,500 snout moth species names for which she is a collaborator.

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Original source:

Scholtens, B. & M. A. Solis. 2015. Annotated check list of the Pyraloidea (Lepidoptera) of America North of Mexico. Zookeys.535:1-1136. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.535.6086.

Serendipitous orchid: An unexpected species discovered in Mexican deciduous forests

A new elegant orchid species that grows on rocks in deciduous forests of the Pacific slope of Oaxaca state, Mexico, has finally put an end to a long standing dispute among taxonomists. ‘Sheltered’ under the name of a close relative, the plant has been proved by a research team, led by Dr. Leopardi-Verde, to be different enough for a species of its own. Its distinct features, including shape, size and colors, are discussed and published in the open-access journal PhytoKeys.

When scientists Drs. Carlos L. Leopardi-Verde, Universidad de Colima and Centro de Investigacion Cientifica de Yucatan, German Carnevali and Gustavo A. Romero-Gonzalez, both affiliated with Centro de Investigacion Cientifica de Yucatan and Harvard University Herbaria, stumbled across a beautiful orchid in bloom, they found themselves so surprised by its unique colors and forms that later on they chose the specific epithet inopinatus, meaning “unexpected”.

One of the most distinctive characters of the new plant is the yellow labellum patterned with crimson to reddish brown lines. Typically for its species complex, this orchid’s leaves are wide and leatherlike and the flowers are relatively large, showy, and leathery to fleshy-leathery petals and sepals. The color of the flowers varies from bronze-green with dark purple lines near the base to pale pink and creamy white splashed with reddish-brown spots and lines towards the top.

The plant is between 30 and 42 cm tall, while together with its flowers it reaches between 80 and 90 cm. Each branch of the inflorescence bears from 3 to 8 flowers, which bloom between March and July. Having been recorded only from a few sites on the Pacific slope of Oaxaca state, Mexico, the species appears to be rare.

The authors explain the similarities between the new species and its close relatives. They also discuss the long-held confusion about its taxonomic placement. As a result of the study, a hypothesis about hybridization that has played a role in the evolution and origin of the novelty has been refuted.

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Original source:

Leopardi-Verde CL, Carnevali G, Romero-Gonzalez GA (2016) Encyclia inopinata (Orchidaceae, Laeliinae) a new species from Mexico. PhytoKeys 58: 87-95. doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.58.6479

From Sherborn to ZooBank: Moving to the interconnected digital nomenclature of the future

From the outside, it can seem that taxonomy has a commitment issue with scientific names. They shift for reasons that seem obscure and unnecessarily wonkish to people who simply want to use names to refer to a consistent, knowable taxon such as species, genus or family. However, the relationship between nomenclature and taxonomy, as two quite separate but mutually dependent systems, is a sophisticated way of balancing what we know and what is open to further interpretation.

Nomenclature is a bureaucracy that follows rules and is tied to published records and type specimens. It provides a rigid framework or skeleton for knowledge. Taxonomy, on the other hand, is a data-driven science, influenced by interpretation and resulting in concepts that are open to further test and change. To actually get the answers right, taxonomy needs to be responsive and fluid as a system of knowledge. The link between nomenclature and the published record is also the junction with the data that fuels taxonomic interpretation.

Biodiversity informatics aims to solve this issue, and its founding father is Charles Davies Sherborn. His magnum opus, Index Animalium, provided the bibliographic foundation for current zoological nomenclature. In the 43 years he spent working on this extraordinary resource, he anchored our understanding of animal diversity through the published scientific record. No work has equaled it, and it is still in current and critical use.

This special volume of the open-access journal ZooKeys celebrates Sherborn, his contributions, context and the future for the discipline of biodiversity informatics. The papers in this volume fall into three general areas of history, current practice and frontiers.

The first section presents facets of Sherborn as a man, scientist and bibliographer, and describes the historical context for taxonomic indexing from the 19th century to today. The second section discusses existing tools and innovations for bringing legacy biodiversity information into the modern age. The final section tackles the future of biological nomenclature, including digital access, innovative publishing models and the changing tools and sociology needed for communicating taxonomy.

In the late 1880s Charles Davies Sherborn recognised the need for a full index of names to the original sources that gave them legitimacy, their first publications. He set about making a complete index for names of animals, which are the largest group of described organisms (1.4 million of the current 1.8 million described species are animals). Because this work began while the very basics of nomenclatural rules were being thrashed out, the work itself affected how those rules were codified.

Sherborn’s monumental work, Index Animalium, comprises more than 9,000 pages in 11 volumes and about 440,000 names. This was on the scale of other hugely ambitious tasks at the time that changed the course of communication such as the Oxford English Dictionary. The error rates are astonishingly low, and it became, and it remains to date the most complete reference source for animal nomenclature. Taxonomic studies rely on Sherborn’s work today. While the future for information access is one of the most exciting frontiers for our increasingly interconnected, accelerated society, biodiversity information will continue to be grounded in this seminal work. The future for biodiversity informatics is built on Sherborn’s work, and is expanding to be digital, diversified and accessible.

The publisher of this volume, the journal ZooKeys, is itself a pioneer in developing a more stable and accessible scientific nomenclature. Together with PhytoKeys, ZooKeys is piloting an innovative workflow with a pre-publication automated pipeline for registration of nomenclatural acts. This initiative comes from the EU FP7 project pro-iBiosphere, and in close collaboration with ZooBank (the official online registry for scientific names of animals), Zoological Record, IPNI, MycoBank and Index Fungorum, and the Global Names project. The volume was inspired by a symposium held in Sherborn’s honour at the Natural History Museum (NHM), London, on the 150th year of his birth in 2011, organised by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), in collaboration with the Society for the History of Natural History (SHNH).

Sherborn was a man with a vision for the future and respect for the accomplishments of the past. He would have celebrated the new tools for the ambitious goal of linking all biological information through names that are readable for both machines and humans. He would have understood the tremendous power of interconnected names for biodiversity science overall. And he would have knuckled down and got to work to make it happen.

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Original source:

Michel E (2016) Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond. In: Michel E (Ed.) Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond. ZooKeys 550: 1-11. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.550.7460

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Anchoring Biodiversity Information – Sherborn Special Issue is available to read and order from here.

Seventy-four cuckoos in the nest: A new key to all North European cuckoo wasp species

Captivating with their bright, vivid and brilliantly metallic bodies, the cuckoo wasps are also fascinating with their curious lifestyle, which has given them this common name. However, in terms of their taxonomic grouping, they have been quite problematic due to similarities between species and a wide range of variations within them.

To shed light on the issue, an international research team, led by MSc Juho Paukkunen, Finnish Museum of Natural History, Helsinki, provides descriptions and illustrations of all 74 species found in the Nordic and Baltic countries, including one new, in their recent publication in the open-access journal ZooKeys.

Beautiful in appearance, the cuckoo wasps penetrate the nests of unrelated solitary wasps and solitary bees to lay their eggs, similar to how a cuckoo bird does in songbird nests. With their armoured bodies and the ability to curl up into a tight ball the cuckoo wasps are well-defended against the owners of the nests and their stings and jaws. At the larval stage, they take advantage of their hosts by either parasitising them or stealing their food, eventually killing the host’s offspring.

Within the Nordic representatives of the family there are an exceptionally large number of red-listed and endangered species. This is one of the reasons why the authors intend to trigger more interest among their fellow entomologists about these curious wasps. They have compiled all relevant information concerning their distribution, abundance, habitats, flight season and host species. The authors have tried to keep their identification key as comprehensive and concise as possible, by singling out the essential information on diagnostic characters.

In the present study, the researchers describe a new species, called Chrysis borealis, which can be translated as ‘Northern’ cuckoo wasp. Although the male and female individuals are very similar, there is a significant variation in the colouration within the species. It is especially noticeable between the specimens collected from the northern localities and those from the southern ones. For instance, while the middle section of the body in southern specimens is either bright blue or violet with a greenish shimmer, in northern individuals it is nearly black, turning to greenish or golden green at the periphery.

The varying shades within a certain species are quite common among the cuckoo wasps. While it is often that distinctive colouration among other wasps and insects indicates their separate origin and therefore, taxonomic placement, within the emerald family it can be a mere case of habitat location with the northern populations typically darker.

Such tendencies often lead to doubts such as the one the authors have faced regarding their new species. It has been suggested that the Northern cuckoo wasp is in fact yet another variation of the very similar C. impressa, which is generally slightly brighter in colour, but at the same time distributed in warmer localities. However, using DNA sequence information and morphometric analysis, the team shows that there are enough consistent differences to separate them as distinct species, although they are defined as evolutionarily young siblings.

With their research the authors intend to provide a basis for further and more detailed studies on the distribution, biology and morphology of the North European representatives of these intriguing wasps.

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Original source:

Paukkunen J, Berg A, Soon V, Odegaard F, Rosa P (2015) An illustrated key to the cuckoo wasps (Hymenoptera, Chrysididae) of the Nordic and Baltic countries, with description of a new species. ZooKeys 548: 1-116. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.548.6164

Tramp ant caught globetrotting under false name

A century-old mystery surrounding the origin of an invasive ant species was recently solved by an international team of scientists. Since 1893, when it was first discovered as an invasive species in the Canary Islands, entomologists have been debating where this mystery species came from. While some insisted on the Mediterranean, some proposed Arabia and others argued for Africa. The correct answer? Asia.

The authors of the study, published in the open-access journal ZooKeys, solved the taxonomic puzzle by fitting together disparate pieces of evidence. “I was having a terrible time trying to distinguish this one Asian species from the mysterious ant that was coming in on shipments from the Caribbean, Europe and Africa,” says Dr. Eli Sarnat, University of Illinois, about his research at the Smithsonian on tramp ants that were intercepted at US ports.

Tramp ants, many of which are pest species, are spread across the globe by stowing away in the cargo of ships and planes, thus posing rising environmental, food security and public health concerns.

The same day Sarnat was working on the mysterious ant in the Smithsonian, he received an email from Dr. Evan Economo, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST). Economo and Dr. Georg Fischer, also affiliated with OIST, had included Madagascar samples of the species in a genetic analysis, and the results unexpectedly placed it within a group of Asian species. The closest genetic match to the enigmatic ant turned out to be the very same Asian species that Sarnat had found in the Smithsonian collection.

The last piece of the riddle was discovered thanks to the painstaking work of Dr. Benoit Guénard. Guénard, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, had spent years mapping the global distributions of every ant species known to science. When he compared the ranges of the mysterious ant with the common Asian species, the two fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Evidence gathered from classic taxonomy, modern genetic analysis, and exhaustively researched distribution maps all pointed to the same conclusion.

“What had long been considered two different species — one found across a wide swath of Asia and the other a tramp species spread by humans across Europe, Africa, the Americas and Australia — are actually one single supertramp species,” Economo explained. “It is striking that we had these two continental super-common invaders with almost entirely complementary ranges right under our noses, yet until now no one noticed they were actually the same species,”

Original source:

Sarnat EM, Fischer G, Guénard B, Economo EP (2015) Introduced Pheidole of the world: taxonomy, biology and distribution. ZooKeys 543: 1-109.doi: 10.3897/zookeys.543.6050

Additional information:

This work was supported by USDA APHIS Identification Technology Program (13-8130-1439-CA), subsidy funding to OIST, and NSF (DEB-1145989). This work was supported by USDA APHIS Identification Technology Program (13-8130-1439-CA), subsidy funding to OIST, and NSF (DEB-1145989).

Lava attraction: 74 new beetle species found hiding in plain sight on a Hawaiian volcano

Confined to the limits of Haleakala volcano, Maui Island, Hawaii, the beetle fauna there turns out to be not only extremely diverse, but very abundant as well. When Prof. James Liebherr of the Cornell University Insect Collection thoroughly sampled beetle populations on the volcano, he identified 116 species of round-waisted predatory beetles, including 74 new to science. The taxonomic revision, complete with descriptions of the new species, is now published in the open-access journal ZooKeys.

The present discoveries and observations are certainly surprising due to their scale, even though it has been long known that the Hawaiian Islands support disproportionately high levels of biodiversity. For this group of native round-waisted beetles, called Mecyclothorax in the zoological naming system, there are 239 species across the Hawaiian Islands, all of them descended from a single colonizing species.

The 116 species known from Haleakala make that volcano the center of biodiversity for this group within Hawaii. These beetles’ evolution during the 1.2-million-year lifespan of Haleakala volcano means they have speciated faster than most organisms on Earth, including the Hawaiian Drosophila and the cichlid fishes of eastern Africa.

No less striking is the fact that the 74 newly described beetle species previously evaded discovery within the limits of Haleakala’s 1,440 km2 of surface area. Reasons for this include the restricted distributions of many of the beetle species, and the previous lack of comprehensive field sampling. During his research, Prof. Liebherr examined all quarters of the mountain to eventually find many places of 1′ latitude × 1′ longitude where more than 20Mecyclothorax species lived closely together within a limited area of forest.

Most of these diverse microhabitats were discovered in windward rainforests. Moreover, different forest areas, geographically isolated from each other by volcanic lava flows, steep valleys, or extensive mudflows, supported different sets of species. “Haleakala volcano is a large pie with different sets of beetle species living in the different slices,” comments Prof. Liebherr. “Actually the different pie slices are just like the original Hawaiian land divisions called ahu pua’a, showing that the Hawaiian people had a keen sense for how their island home was organized.”

Additionally, the round-waisted beetle species seem to thrive across a wide range of altitudes, with their populations covering the major part of the mountain’s height. Historical as well as modern records have identified representatives of these insects from 450-metre elevation up to the volcano’s summit at 3000 m. However, given land conversion and the influx of alien invasive plants, habitats below about 1000 m have been seriously disrupted, and these elevations support few native beetles.

Looking to the future, Liebherr points out that “the substantial level of sympatry, associated with occupation of diverse microhabitats by these beetles, provides ample information useful for monitoring biodiversity of the natural areas of Haleakala.”

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Original source:

Liebherr JK (2015) The Mecyclothorax beetles (Coleoptera, Carabidae, Moriomorphini) of Haleakala-, Maui: Keystone of a hyperdiverse Hawaiian radiation. ZooKeys 544: 1-407. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.544.6074

Rare Amazonian butterfly named after British national treasure Sir David Attenborough

A beautiful new Black-eyed Satyr species has become the first butterfly named in honour of the popular naturalist and TV presenter Sir David Attenborough. Although not the first animal to be named after the British national treasure, the butterfly is so rare that it is known only from lowland tropical forests of the upper Amazon basin in Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil. The study, conducted by an international team of researchers, led by Andrew F. E. Neild, Natural History Museum, London, and Shinichi Nakahara, McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity and Entomology & Nematology Department, University of Florida, is published in the open-access journal ZooKeys.

The presently described Attenborough’s Black-eyed Satyr, scientifically called Euptychia attenboroughi, has such a restricted distribution that all of its known sites lie within 500 kilometres from each other in the north-west of the upper Amazon basin.

Best known for scripting and presenting the BBC Natural History’s ‘Life’ series, Sir David Attenborough is also a multiple winner of the BAFTA award and a president of Butterfly Conservation.

“Other animals and plants have previously been dedicated to Sir David, but it makes us happy and proud to be the first to dedicate a butterfly species in his name,” says Andrew Neild. “Although we are a large team from several countries from across four continents and speaking different languages, we have all been deeply influenced and inspired by Sir David’s fascinating and informative documentaries.”

The butterfly’s atypical wings in comparison to its relatives, have been the reason the scientists took to plenty of diagnostic characters to define its taxonomic placement. The peculiar patterns and morphology initially led the researchers to think the species could be even a new genus.

“It was a surprise for us that DNA data supported inclusion of this new species in the existing genus Euptychia, since this species lacked a distinctive structural character which was considered to be shared by all members of the genus” explains Shinichi Nakahara.

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Original Source:

Neild AFE, Nakahara S, Zacca T, Fratello S, Lamas G, Le Crom J-F, Dolibaina DR, Dias FMS, Casagrande MM, Mielke OHH, Espeland M (2015) Two new species of Euptychia Hübner, 1818 from the upper Amazon basin (Lepidoptera, Nymphalidae, Satyrinae). ZooKeys 541: 87-108. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.541.6297