Balonca F. Moore, 1901

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 : 10

Balonca F. Moore, 1901 is a valid subgenus of Dodona Hewitson, 1861

Genomic analysis of Dodona Hewitson, 1861 ( type species Melitaea durga Kollar, 1844 ) reveals that the genus partitions into four prominent clades genetically differentiated at the subgenus level ( Fig. 5 ). One of these clades corresponds to Balonca F. Moore, 1901 ( type species Dodona deodata Hewitson, 1876 ), currently regarded as a junior subjective synonym of Dodona . Dodona and Balonca type species differ by 6.8% (45 bp) in their COI barcodes. Therefore, we propose to treat Balonca F. Moore, 1901 , stat. nov. as a subgenus of Dodona Hewitson, 1861. The two other clades do not include type species of any available genus group names and, therefore, correspond to the new subgenera described below.

Figures

Fig. 5. Phylogenetic trees of selected Dodona species constructed from protein-coding regions in: a) the nuclear genome (autosomes), based on 3,488,244 positions, and b) the mitochondrial genome. Different subgenera are colored differently: Ouida subgen. n. (red), Balonca (blue), Egeona subgen. n. (green), and Dodona (magenta). Ultrafast bootstrap (Minh et al. 2013) values are shown at nodes.