Abantiades, Herrich-Schaffer, 1855

Moore, Michael D., Beaver, Ethan P., Bradford, Tessa, Hutchinson, Paul M., Kay, Paul, Temby, Nick, Hamon, Howard & Stevens, Mark I., 2022, Two new species of WesternAustralian Abantiades Herrich-Schäffer (Lepidoptera Hepialidae) and a description of the female of Abantiades paradoxa (Tindale), Zootaxa 5133 (2), pp. 201-225 : 203

Systematics of Abantiades

Molecular analyses (see Figure 1)

The Bayesian analysis reveals a well supported (PP = 1.0) monophyletic Abantiades clade compared to our nine outgroup taxa (Fig. 1). The mtDNA (COI) gene supports the morphological distinction of our two new species that are clearly differentiated from the other 32 Abantiades species in our analysis, which are all defined by unique morphological characters (see Taxonomy section below). For species represented by multiple individuals, we found close intraspecific sequence divergences (Supplementary Table S1 ). For example, the greatest sequence divergences observed within any of our Abantiades species varied up to 1.7% for A. karnka ( Tindale, 1941) , 1.4% for A. furva ( Tindale, 1932) , and 1.5% for A. lineacurva Moore & Edwards, 2014 ); variation that we expect within species reported elsewhere for Lepidoptera using the same COI gene (e.g. Beaver et al. 2020; Moore et al. 2020 b, 2021). However, sequence divergences have been found to vary outside these ranges for some Abantiades species ( Simonsen et al. 2019; Moore et al. 2020a, b).

Sequence divergence comparisons among the Abantiades species, compared to our outgroup taxa, ranged between 6.2–16.0% (Supplementary Table S1 ). Examining between Abantiades species in Figure 1 reveal interspecific sequence divergences of up to 13.5% (e.g. between A. magnificus (T.P. Lucas, 1898) and A. sericatus Tindale, 1932 ). We also observed much lower interspecific sequence divergences in some cases, for example between A. labyrinthicus ( Donovan, 1805) and A. mcquillani Simonsen, 2018 (2.2%) (Supplementary Table S1 ) that may warrant further examination with more complete distributional sampling. However, similar patterns have been observed in some other ghost moths with each corresponding to clear morphological differences (e.g. Moore et al. 2020b).

Our new Abantiades species A . malleus sp. nov. groups with A. marcidus Tindale, 1932 , its nearest neighbour (Fig. 1; PP <0.7), by 5.6–6.1% sequence divergence. Abantiades malleus sp. nov. is quite distinct by sequence divergence of the mtDNA (COI) gene (Supplementary Table S1 ), but in a clade with A. marcidus , A. albofasciatus ( Swinhoe, 1892) , and a species, A. furva , the latter species once placed in the synonymised Bordaia (Fig. 1). Pairwise comparisons between our second new species A. concordia sp. nov. to its nearest neighbour A. paradoxa ( Tindale, 1932) (Fig. 1; PP = 1.0) reveals between 4.1–5.0% sequence divergence. Abantiades concordia sp. nov. conforms to Tindale’s morphological diagnosis for the synonymised ‘Bordaia’ ( Tindale 1932) and does group with two species previously in that genus ( A. paradoxa and A. karnka ) (Fig. 1). However, no close relationship was observed in our analysis to, or between, the other species ( A. furva and A. pica ( Tindale, 1932)) previously in ‘ Bordaia ’, and likewise the species previously in ‘ Trictena ’ although forming a poorly supported monophyletic clade but are embedded within Abantiades (Fig. 1) and provides further support for the synonymy of both genera by Simonsen (2018).