Nylanderia pubens, Williams & Zhang & LaPolla & Schultz & Lucky, 2022

Williams, Jason L., Zhang, Y. Miles, LaPolla, John S., Schultz, Ted R. & Lucky, Andrea, 2022, Phylogenomic Delimitation of Morphologically Cryptic Species in Globetrotting Nylanderia (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) Species Complexes, Insect Systematics and Diversity (AIFB) 6 (1), pp. 1-15 : 6

Nylanderia fulva Complex

Monophyly of the fulva complex is strongly supported by the global ML phylogeny ( Fig. 2 ), the unphased MSC phylogeny ( Fig. 4A ), and the phased MSC phylogeny ( Fig. 4B ). In all three analyses, a single N. pubens sample from Florida (Ny087), the identity of which was based on male morphological diagnostic characters ( Gotzek et al. 2012), is nested within the N. fulva supercolony (see below) from the United States with strong support. This specimen is most closely related to specimens identified as N. cf. fulva from St. Martin in the Caribbean and Lanzarote Taniche in The Canary Islands. In total, the fulva complex includes at least four morphospecies sampled for this study: N. fulva , N. pubens , N. sp. Per2 from Peru (undescribed), and N. sp. FG05 from French Guiana (undescribed).

Figures

Fig. 2. Circular maximum likelihood phylogeny of Nylanderia generated in IQ-TREE 2 from the 80% complete SWSC-partitioned UCE matrix. Biogeography of terminal taxa is based on inferred native ranges and may not indicate collecting locality for known non-native species. Samples indicated with red text are globetrotting species. Nodal support is provided in SH-aLRT (Shimodaira–Hasegawa approximate likelihood ratio test) values on the left side of the node, and UFBoot (ultrafast bootstrap) values on the right side of the node. For both support values, less than 80% is considered weak support, between 80 and 94.9% is considered moderate support, and greater than or equal to 95% is considered strong support.

Fig. 4. Multi-species coalescent phylogenies of the guatemalensis and fulva complexes, generated in ASTRAL-III using 75% complete alignment matrices. (A) (left) represents the unphased MSC analysis and (B) (right) represents the phased MSC analysis. Values on the internal nodes represent local posterior probabilities (LPP),with ≥0.95 indicating strong support and ≤0.75 indicating weak support.Scale bars under phylogenetic trees indicate number of substitutions per site. Photos of N. guatemalensis (Ny097), N. steinheili (Ny101), and N. fulva (Ny191) workers in profile view are to scale and were taken by Brandon Mai.