We report initial results from an ongoing effort to build a library of DNA barcode sequences for Dutch spiders and investigate the utility of museum collections as a source of specimens for barcoding spiders. Source material for the library comes from a combination of specimens freshly collected in the field specifically for this project and museum specimens collected in the past. For the museum specimens, we focus on 31 species that have been frequently collected...

Molecular analyses of turtle relationships have overturned prevailing morphological hypotheses and prompted the development of a new taxonomy. Here we provide the first genome-scale analysis of turtle phylogeny. We sequenced 2,381 ultraconserved element (UCE) loci representing a total of 1,718,154 bp of aligned sequence. Our sampling includes 32 turtle taxa representing all 14 recognized turtle families and an additional six outgroups. Maximum likelihood, Bayesian, and species tree methods produce a single resolved phylogeny. This robust...

Phragmotic or “door head” ants have evolved independently in several ant genera across the world, but in Africa only one case has been documented until now. Carebara elmenteitae (Patrizi) is known from only a single phragmotic major worker collected from sifted leaf-litter near Lake Elmenteita in Kenya, but here the worker castes of two species collected from Kakamega Forest, a small rainforest in Western Kenya, are studied. Phragmotic major workers were previously identified as Carebara...

Spiders (Order Araneae) are massively abundant generalist arthropod predators that are found in nearly every ecosystem on the planet and have persisted for over 380 million years. Spiders have long served as evolutionary models for studying complex mating and web spinning behaviors, key innovation and adaptive radiation hypotheses, and have been inspiration for important theories like sexual selection by female choice. Unfortunately, past major attempts to reconstruct spider phylogeny typically employing the “usual suspect” genes...

Laboratory techniques for high-throughput sequencing have enhanced our ability to generate DNA sequence data from millions of natural history specimens collected prior to the molecular era, but remain poorly tested at shallower evolutionary time scales. Hybridization capture using restriction site-associated DNA probes (hyRAD) is a recently developed method for population genomics with museum specimens. The hyRAD method employs fragments produced in a restriction site-associated double digestion as the basis for probes that capture orthologous loci...

Organismal traits interact with environmental variation to mediate how species respond to shared landscapes. Thus, differences in traits related to dispersal ability or physiological tolerance may result in phylogeographic discordance among co-distributed taxa, even when they are responding to common barriers. We quantified climatic suitability and stability, and phylogeographic divergence within three reed frog species complexes across the Guineo-Congolian forests and Gulf of Guinea archipelago of Central Africa to investigate how they responded to a...

Mitonuclear discordance is a frequently encountered pattern in phylogeographic studies and occurs when mitochondrial and nuclear DNA display conflicting signals. Discordance among these genetic markers can be caused by several factors including confounded taxonomies, gene flow, and incomplete lineage sorting. In this study, we present a strong case of mitonuclear discordance in a species complex of toads (Bufonidae: Incilius coccifer complex) found in the Chortís Block of Central America. To determine the cause of mitonuclear...

Genetic structure within marine species may be driven by local adaptation to their environment, or alternatively by historical processes, such as geographic isolation. The gulfs and seas bordering the Arabian Peninsula offer an ideal setting to examine connectivity patterns in coral reef fishes with respect to environmental gradients and vicariance. The Red Sea is characterized by a unique marine fauna, historical periods of desiccation and isolation, as well as environmental gradients in salinity, temperature, and...

Ultraconserved genomic elements (UCEs) are generally treated as independent loci in phylogenetic analyses. The identification pipeline for UCE probes does not require prior knowledge of genetic identity, only selecting loci that are highly conserved, single copy, without repeats, and of a particular length. Here we characterized UCEs from 11 phylogenomic studies across the animal tree of life, from birds to marine invertebrates. We found that within vertebrate lineages, UCEs are mostly intronic and intergenic, while...

PCR amplification bias is a well-known problem in metagenomic analysis of arthropod communities. In contrast, variation of DNA degradation rates is a largely neglected source of bias. Differential degradation of DNA molecules could cause underrepresentation of taxa in a community sequencing sample. Arthropods are often collected by passive sampling devices, like malaise traps. Specimens in such a trap are exposed to varying periods of suboptimal storage and possibly different rates of DNA degradation. Degradation bias...

Amplicon based metabarcoding promises rapid and cost-efficient analyses of species composition. However, it is disputed whether abundance estimates can be derived from metabarcoding due to taxon specific PCR amplification biases. PCR-free approaches have been suggested to mitigate this problem, but come with considerable increases in workload and cost. Here, we analyze multilocus datasets of diverse arthropod communities, to evaluate whether amplification bias can be countered by (1) targeting loci with highly degenerate primers or conserved...

Large-scale analysis of the fossil record requires aggregation of palaeontological data from individual fossil localities. Prior to computers these synoptic datasets were compiled by hand, a laborious undertaking that took years of effort and forced palaeontologists to make difficult choices about what types of data to tabulate. The advent of desktop computers ushered in palaeontology’s first digital revolution – online literature-based databases, such as the Paleobiology Database (PBDB). However, the published literature represents only a...

Background: The largest radiation of animal life since the end Cretaceous extinction event 66 million years ago is that of schizophoran flies: a third of fly diversity including Drosophila lab fruit flies, house flies, and many other well and poorly known true flies. Rapid diversification has hindered previous attempts to elucidate the phylogenetic relationships among major schizophoran clades. A robust phylogenetic hypothesis for the major lineages containing these 55,000 described species would be critical to...

Background: Echinoidea is a clade of marine animals including sea urchins, heart urchins, sand dollars and sea biscuits. Found in benthic habitats across all latitudes, echinoids are key components of marine communities such as coral reefs and kelp forests. A little over 1,000 species inhabit the oceans today, a diversity that traces its roots back at least to the Permian. Although much effort has been devoted to elucidating the echinoid tree of life using a...

Mites (Acari) are one of the most diverse groups of life on Earth, yet their evolutionary relationships are poorly understood. Also, the resolution of broader arachnid phylogeny has been hindered by an underrepresentation of mite diversity in phylogenomic analyses. To further our understanding of Acari evolution,we design targeted ultraconserved genomic elements (UCEs) probes, intended for resolving the complex relationships between mite lineages and closely related arachnids. We then test our Acari UCE baits in-silico by...

Additional file 1: Supplementary Fig. 1. Residual dry weight biomass after a 56-day incubation. The figure shows that three incubations diverge in terms of biomass degradation. Supplementary Fig. 2. Phylogenetic tree reconstructed based on 49 core universal genes defined by Clusters of Orthologous Groups (COGs) using maximum likelihood. The tree was reconstructed on KBase. Supplementary Fig. 3. Gene proportion per MAG for selected GHs. MAGs with a completeness above 30% and contamination level lower than...

Abstract The genus Acyrtus (Gobiesocidae) is represented by four valid species distributed in the western Atlantic, and a recently described fifth species from the eastern Pacific. Here, we describe a new species endemic to Trindade Island, Brazil, and provide the first phylogenetic inference for the genus including all representatives. The new species can be distinguished from all its congeners by meristic and morphometric characters, as well as genetic differences. It presents low genetic diversity and,...

Aquatic Diptera are some of the most diverse and notable flies, impacting human health and providing ecosystem services. Despite the importance of aquatic Diptera, the evolution of aquatic life history and blood-feeding, are not sufficiently understood. Here, we examine the evolution of aquatic life histories and their associations with blood-feeding across Diptera. Aquatic and blood-feeding Diptera are phylogenetically conserved across the fly tree of life. We found evidence that the most recent common ancestor of...

The skeleton is of fundamental importance in research in comparative vertebrate morphology, paleontology, biomechanics, developmental biology, and systematics. Motivated by research questions that require computational access to and comparative reasoning across the diverse skeletal phenotypes of vertebrates, we developed a module of anatomical concepts for the skeletal system, the Vertebrate Skeletal Anatomy Ontology (VSAO), to accommodate and unify the existing skeletal terminologies for the species-specific (mouse, the frog Xenopus, zebrafish) and multispecies (teleost, amphibian) vertebrate...

Aim: The aim of this study was to assess the impact of pre-Quaternary tectonics and orogeny relative to that of Pleistocene climate change on diversification within the Pseudouroctonus minimus complex, a group of vaejovid scorpions with stenotopic habitat requirements. Location: South-western North America (United States and Mexico). Methods: Multilocus sequence data (1899 base pairs from two mitochondrial and two nuclear genes) were generated from 65 samples of scorpions in the minimus complex. Phylogeographical structure within...

Here, multi-locus sequence data are coupled with observations of live colouration to recognize a new species, Eviota punyit from the Coral Triangle, Indian Ocean and Red Sea. Relaxed molecular clock divergence time estimation indicates a Pliocene origin for the new species, and the current distribution of the new species and its sister species Eviota sebreei supports a scenario of vicariance across the Indo-Pacific Barrier, followed by subsequent range expansion and overlap in the Coral Triangle....

Despite the terrestriality of spiders, species across a diverse array of families are associated with aquatic habitats. Many species in the spider family Dictynidae are associated with water, either living near it, or in the case of Argyroneta aquatica (Clerck, 1757), in it. Previous studies have indicated that this association arose once within the family. Here we test the hypothesis of a single origin via the broadest phylogeny of dictynids and related “marronoids” to date...

The California Floristic Province (CFP) in western North America is a globally significant biodiversity hotspot. Elucidating patterns of endemism and the historical drivers of this diversity has been an important challenge of comparative phylogeography for over two decades. We generated phylogenomic data using ddRADseq to examine genetic structure in Uroctonus forest scorpions, an ecologically restricted and dispersal-limited organism widely distributed across the CFP north to the Columbia River. We coupled our genetic data with species...

Surprisingly little is known about body-size evolution within the most diverse amphibian order, anurans (frogs and toads), despite known effects of body size on the physiological, ecological, and life-history traits of animals more generally. Here we examined anuran body-size evolution among 2434 species with over 200 million years of shared evolutionary history. We found clade-specific evolutionary shifts to new body-size optima along with numerous independent transitions to gigantic and miniature body sizes, despite the upper...

The Camponotus subgenus Mayria is revised based on the analysis of both qualitative morphological characters and morphometric traits. The multivariate analysis combined the Nest Centroid (NC)-clustering method and Partitioning Algorithm based on Recursive Thresholding (PART) function to generate species hypotheses based on 19 continuous morphological traits of minor workers. The proposed species hypotheses were confirmed by cumulative Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). Morphometric ratios for the subsets of minor and major workers were used in species...