DNA barcoding and morphology reveal European and western Asian Arctia villica (Linnaeus, 1758) as a complex of species (Lepidoptera, Erebidae, Arctiinae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Currently, the genus Arctia Schrank, 1802 includes approximately 16 species in the Palaearctic region, depending on the taxonomic interpretation. Here, populations of the Arctia villica (Linnaeus, 1758) morphospecies complex were studied from Europe to the Middle East (Turkey, northern Iran) by molecular methods. Morphological treatment has traditionally revealed the presence of five nominal taxa: A. villica (Linnaeus, 1758), A. angelica (Boisduval, 1829), A. konewkaii (Freyer, 1831), A. marchandi de Freina, 1983, and A. confluens Romanoff, 1884. The molecular approach tests whether they represent well-delimited species. Subsequently, this study corroborates the suitability of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (COI) marker sequence for species delimitation. In total, 55 barcodes of the Arctia villica complex were compared, and two molecular species delimitation algorithms were applied to reveal the potential Molecular Operational Taxonomic Units (MOTUs), namely the distance-based Barcode Index Number (BIN) System, and the hierarchical clustering algorithm based on a pairwise genetic distances approach using the Assemble Species by Automatic Partitioning (ASAP). The applied ASAP distance-based species delimitation method for the analysed dataset revealed an interspecific threshold of 2.0–3.5% K2P distance as suitable for species identification purposes of the Iberian A. angelica and the Sicilian A. konewkaii and less than 2% for the three taxa of the A. villica clade: A. villica , A. confluens , and A. marchandi . This study contributes to a better understanding of the taxonomy of the genus Arctia and challenges future revision of this genus in Turkey, the Caucasus, Transcaucasia as well as northern Iran using standard molecular markers.
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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 | 0.000 | 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".