D3162: Is Coloburiscidae monophyletic: A test of the Gondwanan Hypothesis

Tuesday, November 2, 2021

9:00 AM – 6:30 PM MT

Location:: Exhibit Hall F

Presenting Author(s)

JM

Jarod P. Meecham

Utah Valley University
Vineyard, Utah, United States

Co-Author(s)

TO

T. Heath Ogden

Full Professor
Utah Valley University
Orem, Utah, United States

This research aims to elucidate the phylogenetic relationships of the mayfly family Coloburiscidae

(Ephemeroptera) - the spinose gilled mayflies. This family comprises three genera: Murphyella, Coloburiscoides, and Coloburiscus. A unique characteristic of this family is that they demonstrate Gondwanan distribution being found in New Zealand, Australia, and South America. In past studies, combined morphological and molecular data have questioned the family’s monophyly. The molecular data that has been used mostly comes from five “traditional” genes used in insect molecular phylogenetics. We compared our newly generated phylogenomic data to these traditional genes. We used targeted capture next generation sequencing to generate over 400 exons from the mayfly genome to create a large phylogenomic dataset. Bioinformatic software was used to align the data and carry out phylogenetic tree reconstruction using maximum likelihood, Bayesian, and maximum parsimony analyses. The resulting trees support the monophyly of Coloburiscidae, confirming the hypothesis of this research.