Capys (Afrix)

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 : 31-32

Afrix Grishin , new subgenus

http://zoobank.org/ 0EC2FE69-362B-4D26-BCAB-33E037003D40

Type species. Dipsas antalus Hopffer, 1855 .

Definition. Genomic phylogeny reveals that African species currently placed in Deudorix Hewitson, 1863 ( type species Dipsas epijarbas F. Moore, 1858 ) or Virachola F. Moore, 1881 ( type species Deudorix perse Hewitson, 1863 ) are not monophyletic with these genera and instead form a clade sister to another African genus Capys Hewitson, 1865 ( type species Papilio alpheus Cramer, 1777 ), being closely related to it ( Fig. 24 purple and magenta); e.g., their COI barcodes differ by 4% (26 bp). Accordingly, we assign these species to the genus Capys , but, in light of some genetic divergence and pronounced differences in wing shape and pattern, we recognize them as a distinct subgenus. This new subgenus corresponds to “ Virachola ” of Stempffer (1967) who summarized its morphological characters. In brief, the aedeagus is typically longer; falces are shorter and thicker, in many species with a small apophysis; valvae are bladeshaped, frequently shorter, and are fused from the base, in some species for nearly their entire length, and are either long and terminally pointed or appear irregularly truncated ( Larsen 2005); the hindwing with a prominent tornal lobe and a hair-like tail; the ventral forewing with a hair tuft and the dorsal hindwing with a small androconial spot at the base; the ventral wing pattern is frequently with rounder spots framed or filled by reddish (instead of grayish) scales; the dorsal hindwing is nearly all orange in males of many species. In DNA, a combination of the following characters is diagnostic in the nuclear genome: cce3319. 2.2:T72A, cce3268.2.3:G82A, cce 2518.2.9:T2032C, cce 2518.2.9:A2061G, cce18900.2.2:T168C; and COI barcode: T38T, T304C, 400A, 514T, T547A.

Etymology. The name is a fusion of Af [rican] + [Deudo] rix, referring to the African distribution of this taxon. The name is a feminine noun in the nominative singular.

Species included. The type species (i.e., Dipsas antalus Hopffer, 1855 ), Lycaena batikeli Boisduval, 1833 , Deudorix caliginosa Lathy, 1903 , Deudorix dariaves Hewitson, 1877 , Deudorix dinochares Grose-Smith, 1887 , Deudorix dinomenes Grose-Smith, 1887 , Deudorix diocles Hewitson, [1869] , Deudorix diopolis Hewitson, [1878] , Deudorix ( Virachola) ecaudata Gifford, 1963 , Virachola? edwardsi Gabriel, 1939 , Thecla galathea Swainson, [1821] , Deudorix ( Virachola) kayonza Stempffer, 1956 , Lycaena livia Klug, [1834] , Myrina lorisona Hewitson, [1863] , Deudorix nicephora Hulstaert, 1924 , Deudorix odana Druce, 1887 , Hypolycaena renidens Mabille, 1884 , Deudorix ( Virachola) suk Stempffer, 1948 , Virachola ufipa Kielland, 1978, Deudorix ungemachi Libert, 2004, Deudorix ( Virachola) vansomereni Stempffer, 1951, and Deudorix vansoni Pennington, 1948 .

Parent taxon. Genus Capys Hewitson, 1865 .

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.