Student 10-Minute Presentation
Systematics, Evolution, and Biodiversity
Student
Student Competition
Robert T. Conrow
PhD Candidate
Drexel University
Pottstown, Pennsylvania
Brian Wiegman
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, North Carolina
Jon Gelhaus
Drexel University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Brian Cassel
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, North Carolina
Tipulidae s.s. is a hyper-diverse family of crane flies with cosmopolitan distribution containing 4351 species. Larval habitats are equally diverse from roots of desert plants to fast-flowing aquatic habitats. Despite this diversity and near-global distribution, no comprehensive hypothesis of relationships has been proposed among the 37 genera and 86 subgenera. Here we provide the first comprehensive generic level molecular phylogeny of the family Tipulidae s.s. using anchored hybrid enrichment to extract and compare sequences from 289 taxa of Tipulidae. The resulting best Maximum Likelihood tree contained specimens representing 246 species (5%) but contained most genera (72%) with well supported nodes at all levels. We also performed a fossil calibration to set the minimum age of the family, and track the major shifts in the evolution of Tipulidae through time. Tipulidae remained monophyletic and sister to Cylindrotomidae but we did not recover the three-subfamily topography based on accepted classification, instead finding a topography of 5 subfamilies somewhat incongruent with current classifications. We also recovered the proposed “Lunatipula-Vestiplex” clade as a unique clade within Tipulinae that corresponds to a recent, rapid shift towards terrestrial larval habitats. We further constructed a larval morphological trait database and tested the ancestral state of larval morphological characters known only to terrestrial or aquatic larvae to better understand how the larvae of Tipulidae evolved to survive a changing climate.