The 10 species ofHelicopsychefrom the African mainland have restricted distributions in the Eastern Arc mountains and the Ruwenzori Range. These species were compared with nine representatives of candidate sister groups from other biogeographic regions in cladistic analyses. The representatives of candidate sister groups included otherHelicopsychevon Siebold 1856 as well as species from other genera within the family Helicopsychidae, i.e.RakiuraMcFarlane 1973,CochliophylaxSchmid 1993 andCochliopsycheM#xFC;ller 1885. The analysis was based on 36 morphological characters in adult males (nine coded as multistates) and was performed with the exhaustive search option (implicit enumeration) for most parsimonious trees in the program Hennig86. Two alternative procedures for polarising the character transformations both indicated that the African species constitute a monophyletic group with the sister species found on the Seychelles. In the first procedure we usedSericostomaLatreille 1825 as the outgroup. (The family Sericostomatidae has previously been suggested as the sistergroup to the clade including Helicopsychidae at the base). We thus generated two equally parsimonious trees differing only in the configuration of two probably closely related African species. In the second procedure we excludedSericostomaand computed a Wagner network which was subsequently rooted atRakiura vernaleMcFarlane 1973. This resulted in four trees, differing from those mentioned above only in the topology of taxa probably distantly related to the African species.
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