engleski

The bland, the bald, the beautiful: Evolution of filtering carnivorous Drusinae (Limnephilidae, Trichoptera)

The caddisfly subfamily Drusinae Banks comprises roughly 100 species inhabiting mountain ranges in Europe, Asia Minor and the Caucasus. A 3–gene phylogeny of the subfamily previously identified three major clades that were corroborated by larval morphology and feeding ecologies: scraping grazers, omnivorous shredders and filtering carnivores. Larvae of filtering carnivores exhibit unique head capsule complexities, unknown from other caddisfly larvae. Here we assess the species-level relationships within filtering carnivores, hypothesizing that head capsule complexity is a derived state based on the simple shapes observed in the other feeding groups. We summarize the current taxonomy of the group, present Drusus krpachi sp. nov., and D. puskasi sp. nov., and discuss larval species-level identification. We infer relationships of all known filtering carnivorous Drusinae and 34 additional Drusinae species using Bayesian species tree analysis of 3805 bp of sequence data from six gene regions (mtCOI5-P, mtCOI3-P, 16S mrDNA, CADH, WG, 28S nrDNA). Our analyses support monophyly of the three feeding ecology groups but fail to fully resolve internal relationships. Within filtering carnivores, variation in head setation and frontoclypeus structure may be associated with progressive niche adaptation, with less complex species recovered at a basal position. We propose that diversification of complex setation and frontoclypeus shape represents a recent evolutionary development, hypothetically enforcing speciation and niche specificity within filtering carnivorous Drusinae.

Phylogeny; ∗BEAST; Species tree; Larval key; Filter-feeding

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