Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

1427

Date

2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Biology

Committee Chair

Duane McKenna

Committee Member

Randall Bayer

Committee Member

Matthew Parris

Abstract

Superfamily Curculionoidea Latreille, 1802 (weevils) is an extraordinarily species rich clade. With 61,851 described species in 5,584 genera, weevils account for 16% of all described beetle species (389,000 species). The purpose of this thesis was to reconstruct the higher-level phylogeny of Curculionoidea using a newly developed approach for generating phylogenomic data, known as "anchored phylogenomics" (AE). This study marks the first time that AE has been used in beetles. A total of 70 weevil species from all families and most subfamilies were sampled including two outgroups. All families were recovered as monophyletic, except Nemonychidae, which was rendered paraphyletic by Anthribidae. We recovered the first maximal (100%) maximum likelihood bootsrap support (MLBS) for a clade containing Brentidae and Curculionidae, which were sister groups. Relationships in this study were similar to those in previously published studies; however this study provided stronger statistical support for the family and subfamily-level relationships than previous studies.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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