Vanessa on the Canary Islands

[Jorge Bizarro]

This may be a somewhat late posting for the subject but just want to
remember that V. indica flies in MADEIRA island also; i'm not sure if
together with atalanta.

Jorge

----- Original Message -----
From: "Niklas Wahlberg" <Niklas.Wahlberg at zoologi.su.se>
To: <leps-l at lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Monday, December 17, 2001 7:28 AM
Subject: Re: Vanessa on the Canary Islands


> 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


 
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