August 2, 2014
April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
In the first study of its kind to use large-scale, next-generation DNA sequencing, a team of researchers from the University of Florida have traced nearly 3,000 genes to the earliest common ancestor of butterflies and moths. The findings, to be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, create an extensive “Tree of Lepidoptera” and build the evolutionary framework for future ecological and genetics insect research.
Several of the study’s findings were surprising, including the discovery that butterflies are more closely related to small moths than to larger ones. This one finding completely changes the previously held ideas of butterfly evolution. The study also increased the number of butterfly species known by identifying that some previously classified moths were actually butterflies.
“This project advances biodiversity research by providing an evolutionary foundation for a very diverse group of insects, with nearly 160,000 described species,” said Akito Kawahara, assistant curator of Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “With a tree, we can now understand how the majority of butterfly and moth species evolved.”
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