Pontia edusa (Fabricius, 1777)

Zhang, Jing, Cong, Qian, Shen, Jinhui, Song, Leina & Grishin, Nick V., 2023, Genomic analysis reveals new species and subspecies of butterflies, The Taxonomic Report of the International Lepidoptera Survey 11 (6), pp. 1-63 : 6

Pontia edusa (Fabricius, 1777) is confirmed as a species distinct from Pontia daplidice (Linnaeus, 1758)

Although it cannot be readily identified by external appearance, Pontia edusa (Fabricius, 1777) ( type locality in Germany) is most strongly differentiated genetically from Pontia daplidice (Linnaeus, 1758) ( type locality in South Europe and Africa), with Fst / Gmin /COI barcode difference of 0.85/0.000/8.2% (54 bp) ( Fig. 2). This difference is significantly more than usual for close relatives and is more in line with the difference between species in different subgenera. Therefore, we confirm that Pontia edusa (Fabricius, 1777) is a species distinct from Pontia daplidice (Linnaeus, 1758) . Finally, we note a curious incongruence between the nuclear ( Fig. 2a) and mitochondrial ( Fig. 2b) genome trees. As expected from their phenotypes, Pontia glauconome (Klug, 1829) ( type locality in Egypt) is sister to both P. daplidice and P. edusa in the nuclear genome tree. However, P. edusa gets within the P. glauconome clade in the mitochondrial genome tree, likely due to mitochondrial introgression.