Mitochondrial phylogenomics illuminates the evolutionary history of Neuropterida
- 23 December 2016
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Wiley in Cladistics
- Vol. 33 (6), 617-636
- https://doi.org/10.1111/cla.12186
Abstract
Neuroptera (lacewings) and allied orders Megaloptera (dobsonflies, alderflies) and Raphidioptera (snakeflies) are predatory insects and together make up the clade Neuropterida. The higher‐level relationships within Neuropterida have historically been widely disputed with multiple competing hypotheses. Moreover, the evolution of important biological innovations among various Neuropterida families, such as the origin, timing and direction of transitions between aquatic and terrestrial habitats of larvae, remains poorly understood. To investigate the origin and diversification of lacewings and their allies, we undertook phylogenetic analyses of mitochondrial genomes of all families of Neuropterida using Bayesian inference, maximum likelihood and maximum parsimony methods. We present a robust, fully resolved phylogeny and divergence time estimation for Neuropterida with strong statistical support for almost all nodes. Mitochondrial sequence data are typified by significant compositional heterogeneity across lineages, and parsimony and models assuming homogeneous rates did not recover Neuroptera as monophyletic. Only a model accounting for compositional heterogeneity (i.e. CAT‐GTR) recovered all orders of Neuropterida as monophyletic. Significant findings of the mitogenomic phylogeny include recovering Raphidioptera as sister to Megaloptera plus Neuroptera. The sister family of all other lacewings are the dusty‐wings (Coniopterygidae), rather than Nevrorthidae. Nevrorthidae are instead returned to their traditional position as the sister group of the spongilla‐flies (Sisyridae) and closely related to Osmylidae. Our divergence time analysis indicates that the Mesozoic was indeed a ‘golden age’ for lacewings, with most families of Neuropterida diverging during the Triassic and Jurassic and all extant families present by the Early Cretaceous. Based on ancestral character state reconstructions of larval habitat we evaluate competing hypotheses regarding the life style of early neuropteridan larvae as either aquatic or terrestrial.Keywords
Funding Information
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (31320103902, 31322051, 31672322, 41271063)
- Natural Science Foundation of Beijing Municipality (5162016)
- China Scholarship Council (201406350100)
- National Science Foundation (DEB‐1144119)
This publication has 96 references indexed in Scilit:
- Ancestral Gene Organization in the Mitochondrial Genome of Thyridosmylus langii (McLachlan, 1870) (Neuroptera: Osmylidae) and Implications for Lacewing EvolutionPLOS ONE, 2013
- Early evolution and ecology of camouflage in insectsProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012
- MrBayes 3.2: Efficient Bayesian Phylogenetic Inference and Model Choice Across a Large Model SpaceSystematic Biology, 2012
- PartitionFinder: Combined Selection of Partitioning Schemes and Substitution Models for Phylogenetic AnalysesMolecular Biology and Evolution, 2012
- Ancient pinnate leaf mimesis among lacewingsProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010
- New Algorithms and Methods to Estimate Maximum-Likelihood Phylogenies: Assessing the Performance of PhyML 3.0Systematic Biology, 2010
- PhyloBayes 3: a Bayesian software package for phylogenetic reconstruction and molecular datingBioinformatics, 2009
- A Comparative Analysis of Mitochondrial Genomes in Coleoptera (Arthropoda: Insecta) and Genome Descriptions of Six New BeetlesMolecular Biology and Evolution, 2008
- tRNAscan-SE: A Program for Improved Detection of Transfer RNA Genes in Genomic SequenceNucleic Acids Research, 1997
- Patterns of nucleotide composition at fourfold degenerate sites of animal mitochondrial genomesJournal of Molecular Evolution, 1995