Barcoding the moths of Argentina: unveiling this complex, highly diverse and mostly ignored group of Lepidoptera

LAVINIA OBLANCA, PABLO D.; NUÑEZ BUSTOS, EZEQUIEL; KOPUCHIAN, CECILIA; LIJTMAER, DARÍO A.; TUBARO, PABLO L.

Kunming

Congreso; Fifth International Barcode of Life Conference; 2013

International Barcode of Life y Chinese Academy of Sciences

Lepidopterans constitute the second most diverse group of insects and represent almost half of the sequences of the entire barcode library. However, until 2010 lepidopterans had not been barcoded in Argentina. In addition, even though moths represent over 80% of the described species of this order, there is only a rough estimate of 37,000 species in the Neotropics and no official count in Argentina. In this context, we started to barcode the Lepidoptera of Argentina in 2010 and to assess the diversity of moths in 2012, including the generally ignored Microlepidopterans. The analysis of almost 2,500 COI sequences from around 800 species of moths showed that the interspecific divergence was 14 to 24-fold higher than the intraspecific divergence, which is consistent with the barcode gap reported for other regions. In particular, we found various cases of deep intraspecific divergence (>2%) and species pairs with low sequence distance (