At last, butterflies get a bigger, better evolutionary tree

Cindy Kwok

Feb 16, 2018

Florida Museum of Natural History. “At Last, Butterflies Get a Bigger, Better Evolutionary

Tree.” ScienceDaily, ScienceDaily, 15 Feb. 2018, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180215153902.htm.

I read the article called “At Last, Butterflies Get a Bigger, Better Evolutionary Tree” from the Florida Museum of Natural History. The article is about the studies that Lepidopterists Akito Kawahara and Marianne Espeland have done in order to get a more in depth understanding of butterflies and their relation to other species. Before the Kawahara and Espeland study, butterflies, certain information such as “insights into community ecology, how species originate and evolve, climate change and interactions between plants and insects” had been known. However, a complete map of relations between butterflies did not exist. As a result, Kawahara and Espeland attempted to expand the information by at least 35x increase in genetic info and 3x increase in the taxa. Also using fossil records, their teams have noted several developmental milestones for butterflies. In order to make such complicated and specific “map” of butterfly evolution, the scientists analyzed “a dataset of 352 genetic markers from 207 butterfly species representing 98 percent of tribes, which are a rank above genus but below family and subfamily”. This allowed them to discover that swallowtails were the first family to branch off when previous studies believed that swallowtails and other butterflies shared a common ancestor. The tree that Kawahara and Espeland only show 207 species out of approximately 18,800, but this is a huge first step to understanding the history of butterflies.

This article was important to humanity because it is also important to understand our past nda understand how thing have evolved and became the way they are today. Although the study does not specifically relate to humans, the experiments and the way these scientists have started to map out the butterfly lineage can help bring new light to understanding our own history. As “complex” creatures, it is probable that much of our evolutionary past has not been discovered similar to how not much has been understood about butterflies despite the large amounts of information from previous studies. This just goes to show that new studies can easily disprove findings from older studies and how there is always a room for error.

Overall, there were both pros and cons to the article. One pro was that I liked how it defined certains words like taxa for readers who may not understand what it means. This makes it easier for anybody to read rather than just scientists (more specially biologists). This helps to broaden the amount of readers the article draws in. Another pro is how the article articulates about the findings about butterflies by showing both areas where the new research both agrees and disagrees with older research. One con is that at the bottom, it gives a little backstory about one of the researchers and why they decided to study butterflies. Although it may be interesting, it is not necessarily important and does not contribute much to the article.