Endemicity análisis of the tropical forest of South America bases on Butterflies

SZUMIK C.; GARZÓN-ORDUÑA, I.; BROWER, A.V.Z.; GOLOBOFF P.

Buenos Aires

Simposio; XXXV Internacional Meeting of the Willi Hennig Society; 2016

Willi Hennig Society - MACNBR, CONICET

In recent years a large dataset containing geographical records for the neotropical butterflies in the tribe Heliconiini collected by Keith S. Brown has been digitalized and made available, yet the validity and definition of the centers of endemism he hypothesized have remained untested for 35 years. Here, we add to this dataset Brown's geographical records for ithomiine butterflies, to conduct an endemicity analysis using NDM. Our analyses used three grid sizes, from 0.5 to 2 degrees. No single grid size recovered all the centers of endemism hypothesized by Brown, but many of areas were recovered by at least one of the three alternatives. These data, together with previously published age estimates for butterfly species divergences,  suggest  that  the  Pleistocene  Refugium  Hypothesis  remains  a  plausible  spatiotemporal mechanism for the diversification of the Amazonian butterfly fauna.