Beyond the Colours: Discovering Hidden Diversity in the Nymphalidae of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico through DNA Barcoding
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Recent studies have demonstrated the utility of DNA barcoding in the discovery of overlooked species and in the connection of immature and adult stages. In this study, we use DNA barcoding to examine diversity patterns in 121 species of Nymphalidae from the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Our results suggest the presence of cryptic species in 8 of these 121 taxa. As well, the reference database derived from the analysis of adult specimens allowed the identification of nymphalid caterpillars providing new details on host plant use. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We gathered DNA barcode sequences from 857 adult Nymphalidae representing 121 different species. This total includes four species (Adelpha iphiclus, Adelpha malea, Hamadryas iphtime and Taygetis laches) that were initially overlooked because of their close morphological similarity to other species. The barcode results showed that each of the 121 species possessed a diagnostic array of barcode sequences. In addition, there was evidence of cryptic taxa; seven species included two barcode clusters showing more than 2% sequence divergence while one species included three clusters. All 71 nymphalid caterpillars were identified to a species level by their sequence congruence to adult sequences. These caterpillars represented 16 species, and included Hamadryas julitta, an endemic species from the Yucatan Peninsula whose larval stages and host plant (Dalechampia schottii, also endemic to the Yucatan Peninsula) were previously unknown. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: This investigation has revealed overlooked species in a well-studied museum collection of nymphalid butterflies and suggests that there is a substantial incidence of cryptic species that await full characterization. The utility of barcoding in the rapid identification of caterpillars also promises to accelerate the assembly of information on life histories, a particularly important advance for hyperdiverse tropical insect assemblages.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".