Phylogeny of the genus Amerila (Lepidoptera: Erebidae: Arctiinae: Amerilini), with remarks on male genitalia and descriptions of new species from Africa and Indonesia

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The objective of this paper is to reconstruct the phylogeny of the Palaeotropical arctiine genus Amerila Walker, 1855 through investigations of ancestral distribution and co-evolution of wing patterns linked with mimicry, as well as analyses of genetic and genital morphological traits. We perform analyses of molecular data available from previous studies combined with DNA sequences obtained during this research, a total of 3894 bp for 48 species using one mitochondrial (COI) and six nuclear markers (EF-1α, GAPDH, RpS5, wingless, arginine kinase, and ATP). We analysed the data using two probabilistic methods: Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian Inference. Among the known species-group taxa, we include for the first time in a phylogenetic analysis the species A. accra (Strand), A. bauri Mschler, A. bipartita (Rothschild), A. brunnea bipartitoides Huser & Boppr, A. puella carneola (Hampson), A. castanea (Hampson), A. invidua (Bethune-Baker), A. leucoptera (Hampson), A. lupia (Druce), A. madagascariensis (Boisduval), A. nigrivenosa (Grnberg), A. puella (Fabricius), A. roseomarginata (Rothschild) and A. vitrea saalmuelleri (Rothschild). We describe two new species: A. florinae Ignatev, sp. n. from Bacan island (Indonesia) and A. smithi Lszl, sp. n. from Zambia, the latter included in the phylogenetic analyses. We raise A. brunnea bipartitoides, A. vitrea saalmuelleri and A. puella carneola to species rank: A. bipartitoides stat. rev., A. saalmuelleri stat. rev., A. carneola stat. rev. We illustrate the habitus and the male and female genitalia of most of the taxa presented in this paper.