Story by Alena Sucháčková
A new study on the evolutionary history of widely distributed butterflies published in the Journal of Biogeography.
Big congrats to our team member Alena and colleagues for the new paper 🎉.
Cranberry blue – Agriades optilete (the butterfly). Photo by Jana Marešová.
Some species inhabit very limited areas. On the other hand, the areas of some others are huge – for example, we can name the peregrine falcon, the wolf, or us, humans. Many of such widespread species are common biotic components in the Holarctic realm: Europe, temperate Asia and North America. Nevertheless, such regions and their biota experienced different environments during the Pleistocene climate fluctuations: in Europe and North America, huge continental and mountain glaciers covered a significant part of the landscape, whereas in Eastern Europe, central Asia and Siberia together with the Beringian land bridge, the mammoths and their fellows lived in and created a flowery, rich mosaic of various types of grasslands, shrublands and open forests.
Alena Sucháčková from our lab participated in a study focusing on four Holarctic butterflies with different habitat preferences: Boloria chariclea inhabits tundra, Agriades optilete prefers bogs and humid meadows, Carterocephalus palaemon lives in variable temperate grassland species, and Oeneis jutta is a taiga specialist. The study combines genetic data and species distribution modelling to understand the evolutionary history of the butterflies.
The current landscape of Alaska, the American part of Beringia which has been an important refugium for North American fauna during cold ice age stages. Photo by Jana Marešová.
The biogeographic histories of the studied butterflies differ among subregions and between species occurring in open habitat and forests. In the mostly flat northern and central Asia, butterflies of various types of open habitats lived through the ice ages in widely distributed east-west belts, in contrast to the taiga species, whose populations were fragmented during the Pleistocene, and recently connected again. In the mountainous and oceanic regions of Europe and North America, the ranges of all four species retreated because of the huge glaciation events. After the glaciers melted, butterflies (re)colonized such regions and formed contact zones among populations.
During the ice age stages, some small organisms known from the fossil record, such as open habitat rodents or beetles, dwelled the vast areas of the famous mammoth steppe. Holarctic open habitat butterflies could represent another component of such lost biome.
Reference
Marešová J., Sucháčková Bartoňová A., Konvička M., Hoye T.T., Gilg O., Kresse J.-C., Shapoval N.A., Yakovlev R.V., Faltýnek Fric Z. (2020) The story of endurance: Biogeography and the evolutionary history of four Holarctic butterflies with different habitat requirements. Journal of Biogeography in press: DOI: 10.1111/jbi.14022
Matos Lab 