A group of scientists has discovered a new species of diurnal butterflybaptized as «elusive maiden» (Melitaea pseudornata) and whose distribution extends over almost the entire Iberian Peninsula, except for the southwest and some points in the northeast. So far, the new butterfly has been found in all the peninsular autonomous communities, except Asturias, Madrid and Murcia, although “surely it is found in all of them”.
A team led by scientists from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), a mixed center of the CSIC, and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), together with independent researchers from Andalusia and the Spanish Association for the Protection of Butterflies (Zerynthia) have announced this new species.
The discovery has been published in the journal Insect Systematics and Diversityand provides data on the distribution, genetics and ecology of the new species, exclusive to the Iberian Peninsula.
For Joan C. Hinojosa, lead author of the study and IBE researcher, the finding has been “a surprise”, not only due to the fact that it is quite a challenge to discover new species of butterflies in such an explored geographical area, but also because the new species is present in almost the entire Iberian Peninsula, except for the southwest and some points in the northeast.
unnoticed until now
This new butterfly had gone unnoticed until now because its external appearance is almost indistinguishable from other speciesthe «Iberian maiden» (melitaea phoebe), quite common and widely spread throughout our Peninsula and Europe.
Nevertheless, the main feature that differentiates them is the color of the caterpillars’ heads when they reach the final phase of growth: In the «elusive maiden» it is orange, while in the «older maiden» it is always black.
This fact caught the attention of the Andalusian co-authors Luís Sánchez Mesa and Miguel Muñoz Sariot, as well as Yeray Monasterio León, president of the Zerynthia Association and discoverer of the species in the north of the peninsula, who specifies that “when the first caterpillars with orange heads in Navarra realized that it could be something relevant».
In this way, samples were sent to the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, and DNA studies appreciated that the “elusive maiden” is very different genetically from “elder maiden”.
Likewise, it was also discovered that the new species is “sister” to another that is distributed from Provence to Central Asia, whose scientific name is Melitaea ornata.
Evolution
Roger Vila, researcher at the Butterfly Diversity and Evolution Laboratory at the IBE, explained that It is a new species that has evolved due to the geographical isolation of the Iberian Peninsula, a relatively common fact in these insects.
Around twenty pairs of “sister” species with a similar pattern have already been found, Vila observed, for whom genetic techniques represent a paradigm shift in the study of biodiversity and make us see to what extent we still do not know many of the species in our environment.
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