Original Article
Jin An, Yalin Yao, Ping Gao, Minghua Xiu, Chengmin Shi
Online available: 2024-03-06
Species are not only the
fundamental units of taxonomy but also the basic units of pest management.
Insects of Conogethes are important agricultural and forestry pests.
However, species boundaries within Conogethes often appear obscure. In
the present study, we re-evaluated the species status of Conogethes by
applying three species delimitation approaches based on the mitochondrial DNA
sequences, with particular emphasis on the yellow peach moth C.
punctiferalis (Guenée, 1854). We first optimized species delimitation and
inter-species genetic divergence threshold using a DNA barcoding dataset. The results
revealed that several nominal species of Conogethes species harbored
deeply diverged mitochondrial lineages which were recognized as independent
species by the species delimitation methods. The p-distance between the delimited putative species ranged from
0.0159 to 0.1321 with a mean of 0.0841. Then we refined the species status of C.
punctiferalis using the smallest interspecific distance threshold based on
a geographically comprehensive population-scale dataset. This procedure
narrowed the species concept of C. punctiferalis to a genetically
coherent unit. Further investigation of its intraspecific divergence in the
geographic context revealed that the refined C. punctiferalis was still
widely distributed with the same or highly
similar mitochondrial haplotypes occurring across South and East Asia.