Phylogeny of Leptoceroidea

Researcher: Aysha Prather
This project is a convergence point of two others: I wanted to identify sister-group relationships for study of Calamoceratidae, while collecting data for the leptoceroid portion of the Phylogeny of the Trichoptera project, which is using molecular data to recover subordinal relationships within Trichoptera. Also, I wanted to test the methodology and resulting relationship hypotheses of earlier authors. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (DEB 9796097 and 9972724).
The Leptoceroidea is comprised of between 7 and 14 families, depending on the author’s definition. Opinion among Trichoptera workers coalesces on 8 families. In examining the literature, I found that a consensus of current relationship hypotheses is more or less a bush. The 4 families Calamoceratidae, Leptoceridae, Molannidae, and Odontoceridae are usually grouped together. However, these relationships have not previously been rigorously analyzed.
Sequence data were collected in the laboratories of Karl Kjer (Rutgers University) and Susan Weller (University of Minnesota). Data were collected from the mitochondrial gene Cytochrome Oxidase subunit I (COI) and nuclear ribosomal coding genes. A recent study of higher-level relationships in Trichoptera (Frania & Wiggins 1997) was based on 70 morphological and developmental characters of larval and adult caddisflies. I scored these same characters, with more thorough taxon sampling, and added another 30+ characters.

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