Pardaleodes murcia (Plötz, 1883)

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 : 37

Pardaleodes murcia (Plötz, 1883) is a species distinct from Pardaleodes incerta (Snellen, 1872)

Genomic analysis reveals that Hesperia murcia

(Plötz, 1883) (type locality not specified, syntype sequenced as NVG-21116G06), currently treated as a subspecies of Pardaleodes incerta (Snellen, 1872)

( type locality in Angola), is not monophyletic with it and is sister to the clade of P. incerta (Stoll, 1781)

together with Pardaleodes edipus (Stoll, 1781) ( type locality in South Africa) (Fig. 37), genetically differentiated from them with Fst / Gmin /COI barcode difference of 0.61/0.00/4.6% (30 bp) ( P. incerta ) and

0.64/0.00/5.0% (33 bp) ( P. edipus ). Therefore, we Fig. 37. The nuclear genome tree (autosomes) of selected propose that Pardaleodes murcia (Plötz, 1883) , stat. Pardaleodes species: P. edipus (violet), P. incerta (blue), P. murcia stat. rest. (red), P. tibullus (cyan), P. bule (olive), rest. is a species distinct from Pardaleodes incerta P. sator (green), and P. pusiella stat. rest. (magenta).

(Snellen, 1872). Sequencing a series of specimens from additional localities in western Africa and comparing them with genomic sequences of P. murcia syntypes may help in determining the type locality of this species more precisely .