Virachola F. Moore, 1881

Zhang, Jing, Cong, Qian, Shen, Jinhui, Song, Leina & Grishin, Nick V., 2025, Advancing butterfly systematics through genomic analysis, The Taxonomic Report of the International Lepidoptera Survey 12 (5), pp. 1-201 : 29

Virachola F. Moore, 1881 is a valid genus distinct from Deudorix Hewitson, 1863

Genomic phylogeny reveals that Deudorix Hewitson, 1863 ( type species Dipsas epijarbas F. Moore, 1858 ) is not monophyletic and species placed in this genus belong to four different clades ( Fig. 24 blue, red, green, and magenta). The first is the clade with the type species of Deudorix , thus corresponding to this genus ( Fig. 24 blue). This clade is sister to several genera that include Artipe Boisduval, 1870 ( Papilio amyntor Herbst, 1804 , a junior homonym, the valid name of this species is Papilio eryx Linnaeus, 1771 ) and Capys Hewitson, 1865 ( type species Papilio alpheus Cramer, 1777 ). The second clade, which is not monophyletic with Deudorix , corresponds to the genus Virachola F. Moore, 1881 ( type species Deudorix perse Hewitson, 1863 ) ( Fig. 24 green), which at times is considered a valid genus ( Rawlins et al. 2020). Thus, our phylogeny offers decisive evidence for treating Virachola F. Moore, 1881 , stat. rest. as a genus distinct from Deudorix . However, Virachola is closely related to Artipe and could potentially be treated as its subgenus—a possibility we leave for future investigation. Furthermore, only Asian species are included in Virachola . African species form a clade that is sister to Capys , and we assign them to this genus within a newly described subgenus, detailed below. This new subgenus of Capys corresponds to the third clade of species currently in Deudorix ( Fig. 24 magenta). The fourth clade is sister to all members of this group of several genera ( Fig. 24 red) and it corresponds to a new genus that is described next.

Figures

Fig. 24. Phylogenetic trees of selected Lycaenidae species constructed from protein-coding regions in: a) the nuclear genome (autosomes), based on 447,723 positions, and b) the mitochondrial genome; and c) a BioNJ (Gascuel 1997) dendrogram constructed from COI barcodes using the phylogeny.fr server (Dereeper et al. 2008). Different genera are colored differently: Ajenorix gen. n. (red), Bindahara (gray), Artipe (olive), Virachola stat. rest. (green with subgenus Crates subgen. n. in brown), Capys (purple with subgenus Afrix subgen. n. in magenta), Deudorix (blue with subgenus Wacus subgen. n. in dark blue), and Pilodeudorix (cyan with Pilodeudorix batikelides comb. nov. labeled in orange). Ultrafast bootstrap (Minh et al. 2013) values are shown in (a) and (b), and regular bootstrap values (as fractions) from 100 replicates are shown in (c). In the COI barcode dendrogram (c), species are added from the BOLD database (Ratnasingham and Hebert 2007) (identification not checked) and their BOLD Sample ID (not equal to 8 symbols) or GenBank accession (8 symbols starting from a letter) are given. Sequences obtained by us are denoted by the sample ID of 8 symbols starting from a number. Gaps in branches indicate where a vertical slice of the tree was removed to reduce its horizontal dimension (to allow an increase in the font size), i.e., branches with gaps are longer than shown.