Phylogeny of the Sympetrinae (Odonata: Libellulidae): further evidence of the homoplasious nature of wing venation

Abstract Sympetrinae is the largest subfamily of the diverse dragonfly family Libellulidae. This subfamily, like most libellulid subfamilies, is defined currently by a few wing venation characters, none of which are synapomorphies for the taxon. In this study, we used DNA sequence data from the nuclear locus elongation factor‐1α and the mitochondrial loci 16S and 12S rRNA, together with 38 wing venation characters, to test the monophyly of the Sympetrinae and several other libellulid subfamilies. No analysis recovered Sympetrinae as monophyletic, partly because of the position of Leucorrhinia (of the subfamily Leucorrhininae) as a strongly supported sister to Sympetrum (of Sympetrinae) in all analyses. The subfamilies Brachydiplactinae, Leucorrhininae, Trameinae and Trithemistinae were also found not to be monophyletic. Libellulinae was the only subfamily supported strongly as monophyletic. Consistency indices and retention indices of wing venation characters used to define various subfamilies were closer to zero than unity, showing that many of these characters were homoplasious, and therefore not useful for a classification scheme within Libellulidae.