Paracleros Berger, 1978

Zhang, Jing, Cong, Qian, Shen, Jinhui, Song, Leina & Grishin, Nick V., 2023, Butterfly classification and species discovery using genomics, The Taxonomic Report of the International Lepidoptera Survey 11 (3), pp. 1-94 : 70

Paracleros Berger, 1978 is a subgenus of Acleros Mabille, 1885

Acleros Mabille, 1885 (type species Cyclopides leucopyga Mabille, 1877 ) and Paracleros Berger, 1978 (type species Acleros biguttulus Mabille, 1889 ) are two phenotypically similar sister genera, which, taken together, are prominently separated from others ( Figs. 45, 46). COI barcode difference between their type species is 9.1% (60 bp), which is borderline for distinct genera in many butterfly groups. Moreover, Acleros , as currently circumscribed, is not a genetically prominent group and splits into two such groups in the nuclear genome tree ( Fig. 45): the nominotypical Acleros and the other one, which is proposed as a new subgenus below. In the mitochondrial genome tree, Acleros is not even monophyletic, albeit with a weaker support ( Fig. 46). On the one hand, we see that Acleros and Paracleros taken together form a prominent clade. On the other hand, Acleros and Paracleros are not prominently separated from each other, and there is a third clade of nearly the same rank. This clade is currently included in Acleros but is sister to Paracleros in the mitochondrial genome tree. Neither of these three groups consists of a large number of species. For all these reasons, we propose to treat Paracleros Berger, 1978 , stat. nov. as a subgenus of Acleros Mabille, 1885 .