A “complex” problem: delimiting sibling species boundaries in black flies (Diptera: Simuliidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Rapid and recent lineage radiations pose challenges to systematists. Using members of the highly diverse Simulium arcticum Malloch complex, we tested whether the cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) barcoding gene can differentiate black fly sibling species. Members of the S. arcticum complex were monophyletic in relation to two morphospecies and two cryptic species of the Simulium malyschevi Dorogostaisky et al. and Simulium noelleri Friederichs species-groups, respectively. Of five S. arcticum sibling species analysed, only Simulium negativum Adler et al. was monophyletic. No other members of the complex could be distinguished using COI barcodes. The inability to resolve S. arcticum sibling species resulted because (1) haplotypes were shared between species and (2) the distribution of interspecific genetic distances completely overlapped the range of variation within species. Potential sources of incongruence between barcode data and species boundaries include imperfect taxonomy, inadequate genetic information, incomplete lineage sorting, and/or introgressive hybridization. We ruled out imperfect taxonomy because chromosomal, ecological, and distributional evidence support the validity of S. arcticum sibling species. Therefore, current nomenclature should be maintained pending further study. We conclude that one or more of the latter three sources of incongruence could be responsible for the lack of reciprocal monophyly among species of the S. arcticum complex.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".