Vanessa on the Canary Islands

[Niklas Wahlberg]

Vanessa indica's disjunct distribution is really interesting. I think it 
was W. D. Field in his 1971 revision of the Vanessa group that speculated 
about the possibility of Vanessa indica being brought to the Canaries by 
Portugese sailors in the 1500's. In my own work I've been able to sequence 
1450 base pairs of the COI gene from one Japanese indica and one Canary 
Island indica. Now the sample size is extremely limited and I'm not going 
to make any conclusions, just the observation that the pairwise divergence 
of the two sequences is about 3%. If there is anything like a molecular 
clock running in the COI gene as postulated by Andy Brower in one of his 
publications, these haplotypes split up about 1.5 million years ago 
(WARNING: this is speculation!). That would be quite some time before the 
Portugese (or anybody else for that matter) were sailing! I think it an 
interesting observation. Now all I need to do is get about 10 more 
individuals (or even more) of Vanessa indica from Asia and to sequence my 
samples of Vanessa dejeani and Vanessa samani (both putatively related to 
indica), to see whether the Canary haplotype is still present in Asia...

Cheers,
Niklas

At 17:37 16.12.2001 -0500, John R. Grehan wrote:

>>About Vanessa vulcania (or V. indica vulcania, whatever)... Is it an endemic
>>  species of the Canary Islands? I don´t think so, i mean, it´s rather 
>> strange
>>  as other populations of this species only occur in eastern and southern 
>> Asia.
>>  It must have come in boats, etc.
>>
>>Eduardo Marabuto
>>Portugal
>
>
>I would suggest some caution on this one. One does not have to jump into 
>boats to take account of an affinity in Vanessa between the Canaries and 
>Asia of this kind. Biogeographic connections between Asia and western 
>Europe/Africa are commonplace so no traveling boats need even be 
>considered for Vanessa indica any more than suggesting someone picked up 
>some plants of Apollonias in India and dropped them of at the Canaries to 
>become another species, or that the Canaries plant genus Phyllis was is 
>descended from the genus Galopina originally picked up in South Africa. 
>Further, in taking account of the biogeography of Vanessa ('red 
>admiral'  alliance) the genus has pattern of spatial replacement of most 
>species throughout its range which borders the Tethyan geosyncline and 
>associated land between North America and the Chatham Islands (New 
>Zealand). The Canaries are an integral part of a global biogeographic 
>structure of Mesozoic origin).
>
>John Grehan
>
>
>John Grehan
>Frost Entomological Museum
>Pennsylvania State University
>Department of Entomology
>501 ASI Building
>University Park, PA 16802. USA.
>
>Phone: (814) 863-2865
>Fax: (814) 865-3048
>
>Frost Museum
>http://www.ento.psu.edu/home/Frost/index.html
>
>
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Niklas Wahlberg
Department of Zoology
Stockholm University
S-106 91 Stockholm
SWEDEN

Phone: +46 8 164047
Fax:   +46 8 167715

http://www.zoologi.su.se/research/wahlberg/


 
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