Mountains as Islands: Species Delimitation and Evolutionary History of the Ant-Loving Beetle Genus Panabachia (Coleoptera, Staphylinidae) from the Northern Andes.

ABSTRACT: The ant-loving beetle genus Panabachia Park 1942 is a poorly studied beetle lineage from the new world tropics. We recently collected Panabachia from several previously unrecorded locations in the páramo biome of the high Ecuadorian Andes, with males exhibiting great morphological variation in the distribution of the foveae and depressions in the pronotum, as well as aspects of the male genitalia. Here, we employ phylogenetic and species delimitation methods with mitochondrial (COI) and nuclear protein-coding (wingless) gene sequences to examine the concordance of morphological characters and geography with hypothesized species boundaries. Three methods of species delimitation (bPTP, GMYC and Stacey) were used to estimate the number of species, and divergence times bet

SUBMITTER: Munoz-Tobar SI 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7023032 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature