Cryptic speciation associated with geographic and ecological divergence in two Amazonian Heliconius butterflies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The evolution of reproductive isolation via a switch in mimetic wing coloration has become the paradigm for speciation in aposematic Heliconius butterflies. Here, we provide a counterexample to this, by documenting two cryptic species within the taxon formerly considered Heliconius demeter Staudinger, 1897. Amplified fragment length polymorphisms identify two sympatric genotypic clusters in northern Peru, corresponding to subspecies Heliconius demeter ucayalensis H. Holzinger & R. Holzinger, 1975 and Heliconius demeter joroni ssp. nov. These subspecies are reciprocally monophyletic for the mitochondrial genes COI and COII and the nuclear gene Ef1α, and exhibit marked differences in larval morphology and host plant use. COI sequences from 13 of the 15 currently recognized subspecies show that mtDNA differences are reflected across the range of H. demeter, with a deep phylogenetic split between the southern and northern Amazonian races. As such, our data suggest vicariant speciation driven by disruptive selection for larval performance on different host plants. We raise Heliconius demeter eratosignis (Joicey & Talbot, 1925) to Heliconius eratosignis based on nomenclatural priority, a species also comprising H. eratosignis ucayalensis comb. nov. and three other southern Amazonian races. Heliconius demeter joroni spp. nov. remains within H. demeter s.s., along with northern Amazonian and Guianan subspecies.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".