Reinstated status of the butterfly genus Agraulis (Lepidoptera, Nymphalidae, Heliconiinae)

摘要

Butterflies in the genus Agraulis Boisduval & Le Conte (Nymphalidae) are well-known components in many Neotropical habitats across South and Central America, the Caribbean islands and southern United States (DeVries 1987). Members of the genus are recognized by the orange dorsal wing background marked with black spots (except for A. lucina C. Felder & R. Felder). Agraulis appears as sister taxon to Dione Hübner (Nymphalidae) in both morphology-based and DNA sequencebased phylogenies (Penz 1999; Wahlberg et al. 2009; Kozak et al. 2015; Zhang et al. 2019a, b; Chazot et al. 2021). Time of divergence between these genera was estimated as mid-Miocene, while species diversification in the Dione lineage seems to have started approximately 10 million years later in the early Pliocene (Kozak et al. 2015). Penz (1999) found several characters shared by Dione juno (Cramer), D. glycera (C. Felder & R. Felder) and D. moneta Hübner which were not exhibited by the then considered a monotypic genus, Agraulis. Nonetheless, the study by Nu?ez et al. (2022) recognized eight species of Agraulis, including an un-named taxon recently described as Dione (Agraulis) dodona Lamas & Farfán (Farfán et al. 2022). The generic placement of D. dodona followed Zhang et al. (2019b), who downranked Agraulis to subgenus of Dione based on a genomic analysis of North American butterflies (Zhang et al. 2019a).