Using Habitat Suitability Models to understand diversification within Philisca tripunctata in Argentina and Chile.

PACHECO, MARÍA PÍA; SOTO, EDUARDO M.

Turku

Congreso; The 2019 Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology.; 2019

European Society for Evolutionary Biology.

Genetic barcoding is an interesting alternative to use when dealing with limitations while working with a morphological definition of species. Particularly in spiders, considering sexual dimorphism and the difficult to asset genital structures until adultness, different studies had shown that using COI sequences divergence is a valuable tool in this regard. This approach has even been successfully useful to identify cryptic spider´s spices. However, genetic barcoding alone is not enough evidence to a conclusive species delimitation, and so morphological and/or ecological information is needed.An extensive study performed in 2015 using genetic barcoding along the Amaurobioidinae subfamily, one of the three subfamilies from Anyphaenidae, had been useful to asset some conflictive relationships inside the group. In this subfamily we find the genus Philisca in which Philisca tripunctata is placed. The information obtained by genetic barcoding indicates that this species might actually represent two different evolutionaries units.In this work we performed a morphological review from the Philisca tripunctata individuals used in the barcoding analysis and developed, evaluated and defined habitat suitability models in order to infer ecological differences between the two morphos proposed.Results shown both morphos might be living in sympatry but one of them is confined to central Chile, with limited living conditions, while the other morpho might have a larger distribution along center and south Chile and Argentina consistent with an endemism area.