Addis Ababa University

Department of Zoological Sciences

Zool. 843 Advanced Insect Systematics

 Common terms/words in insect systematics and their
definitions

• Taxonomy- the word taxonomy is derived from Greek words: taxis and Nomos, Taxi= arrangement;

Nomos= law

– Hence, taxonomy is the theory and practice of identifying, describing, naming, and classifying

organisms. This gave birth to new sciences called systematics

• Systematics is the scientific study of the kinds and diversity of organisms and the relationships

among them.

– Systematics thus provides the basic tools for characterizing the entities that we study, the

species of organisms.

• Nomenclature: the application of distinctive name to a particular taxa recognized in classification.

• Classification- the arrangement of organisms into groups (taxa, singular

taxon) on the basis of their relationships. It follows that identification can

take place only after a classification has been established.

– Uses inductive procedures

– Evaluates many characters

– Deals with population

• Identification: to say that a particular organisms belongs to a group; place

individuals in a certain taxa using deductive procedure; uses few characters;

deals with individuals.

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 Need for Insect Sytematics

• Systematics has played, and continues to play, a major role in fundamental

evolutionary and ecological studies, for example faunistic surveys, zoogeographic

work, life-history investigations and studies of associations between insects and

other organisms.

• In applied entomology good systematic work is the basis for decisions on the

management of pests.

• For example, in pest-management projects inadequate or faulty systematics

resulted in failure, sometimes with great economic and social cost.

 How to classify insects?
• Insect systematists use a variety of data sources – morphology, molecules (e.g. DNA, RNA, cuticular

hydrocarbons, etc.), karyotypes, behavior, ecology and distribution– to sort individuals into groups.

Systematics depends upon the study and interpretation of characters and their states.

• A character is any observable feature of a taxon, which may differentiate it from other taxa, and the

different conditions of a character are called its states.

– Characters vary in the number of states recognized, and are either binary –having two states,

such as presence or absence of wings– or multistate – having more than two states, such as the

three states, digitiform, hooked, or rhomboid, for the shape of the epandrial process of the

genitalia of Drosophila.
• An attribute is the possession of a particular state of a character; thus a digitiform epandrial process is an attribute of D.

mauritiana, whereas a hooked process is an attribute of D. similans, and a rhomboid one an attribute of D. melanogaster.

The choice of characters and their states depends on their intended use.
• A diagnostic character state can define a taxon and distinguish it from relatives; ideally it should be

unambiguous and, if possible, unique to the taxon.

• Character states should not be too variable within a taxon if they are to be used for the purposes of

diagnosis, classification, and identification.

– Characters showing variation due to environmental effects are less reliable for use in systematics than

those under strong genetic control.

• For example, in some insects, size-related features may vary depending on the nutrition available to

the individual developing insect.

 Characters can be classified according to their precision of measurement.

 A qualitative character has discrete (clearly distinguishable) states.

 A quantitative character has states with values that can be counted or measured, and these can be

further distinguished as meristic (countable) traits (e.g. number of antennal segments, or number

of setae on a wing vein) versus continuous quantitative in which the measurements of a

continuously varying trait (e.g. length or width of a structure) that can be divided into states

arbitrarily or by statistical gap coding. 6

Plesiomorphy -or ancestral character that is present at the base of the tree. For example,
the presence of six legs (shared by all insects) can be hypothesized to have existed in
some common insect ancestor.

Apomorphy- derived state is a characteristic believed to arisen in a recent common

ancestor or a recently evolved feature that appears only in a group of closely related
species. The elytra of that all beetles have serve to separate them from all insects
PARTIAL CLASSIFICATION OF DIPTERA

MONOPHYLETIC

PARAPHYLETIC

POLYPHYLETIC
 Methods of establishing phylogenies
• Phylogenetics – the study of evolutionary relatedness of taxa (groups) – and it provides
information essential for constructing a natural (evolutionary) classification of organisms.
• The various methods that attempt to recover the pattern produced by evolutionary
history rely on observations on living and fossil organisms.
I. Phenetics (Numerical taxonomy): determines the relationships of organisms through a
measure of similarity, considering plesiomorphies (ancestral traits) and apomorphies
(derived traits) to be equally informative.
– It aims at natural classification using numeric algorithms like cluster analysis rather than using
subjective evaluation of properties. A priori every character is given equal weight.
– Their use in phylogeny largely has been abandoned except perhaps for organisms, such as
viruses and bacteria, which exhibit reticulate evolution. However, phenetic methods are useful
in DNA barcoding in which identification of an unknown species is often possible based on
comparing the nucleotide sequences of one of its genes with those in a database of identified
species of the group.
– Phylograms show the branching pattern and the number of character state changes represented
by differences in the branch lengths.
II. Cladistics or Phylogenetic Systematics: In cladistics, classification is mainly based

on common ancestry and hence, believes in cladogenesis, where two taxa originated

in the same branching event have a common ancestor that is not shared by any other

taxon. Thus, cladistics represents only monophyletic taxa in their classifications.

• Cladistics - classifies species of organisms into hierarchical monophyletic groups

(clades) - based on shared derived characteristics (or characters).

• e.g. Character #1 - present in species A, B, C

Character #2 - present in species A, B, but not C

 Have 2 groups - A + B and C

• Cladograms depict only the branching pattern of ancestor/descendant relationships,

and branch lengths have no meaning.

• Molecular phylogenetics:
– Early attempts at molecular systematics were also termed as chemotaxonomy that
made use of proteins, enzymes, carbohydrates, and other molecules that were
separated and characterized using techniques such as chromatography.
– Molecular approaches depend on nucleotide sequences of RNA and DNA and
sequences of amino acids of a protein which are determined using modern
techniques.
– By comparing homologous molecules from different organisms it is possible to
establish their degree of similarity thereby establishing or revealing a hierarchy of
relationship a phylogenetic tree.
– Both the classical morphology based methods and molecular analysis based methods
are of importance as the basic bio-molecular framework of all organisms are similar
and morphology of an organism is actually the manifestations of its genome,
proteome and transcriptome profiles. A combination of the morphological based
methods and molecular analysis based methods thus strengthens the exercise of the
determination of phylogenetic relationships of organisms to a great extent.
• Molecular Markers useful for molecular systematics
– When variation in morphological data become insufficient to distinguish two
organisms-at phyla, class, order, family etc. levels, analysis of the biomolecules are
considered, which are large in number and occur in various forms in organisms.
Therefore, the biomolecular markers have become favorite and sometimes the only
information available for researchers to reconstruct evolutionary history. The big
difference is that there are simply many more molecular characters available, and
their interpretation is generally easier.
– Molecular Markers
 Nuclear ribosomal genes: Ribosomal RNA is considered as the best target for
studying phylogenetic relationship because, it is universal and is composed of highly
conserved as well as variable domains. The ribosomes consist of rRNA and proteins.
– In all organisms the ribosome consists of two subunits, the small ribosomal subunit (SSU)
contains a single RNA species (the 18S rRNA in eukaryotes and the 16S rRNA in others),
and in most eukaryotes the large subunit contains three RNA species (the 5S, 5.8S and
25S/28S rRNAs).
– E.g. 16S rRNA, 28S rRNA, 18S rRNA
 Mitochondrial genes (mtDNA)
 The mitochondrial chromosome is a circular, supercoiled, double stranded DNA
molecule, present in multiple copies in each cell, and is inherited almost exclusively in
maternal fashion. It contains genes with different functions and thus different
evolutionary rates - some are quite conserved while the others are more variable.
Generally it evolves faster and contains a much larger number of length mutations and
transitions than single-copy nuclear DNA.
 Commonly used mitochondrial genes are protein-coding cytb, COI, COII, NADH, ATP, as well as
genes coding for mitochondrial ribosomal subunits, 16S rDNA, 12S rDNA, and so called D-loop
(mitochondrial regulatory region) - depending on the evolutionary divergence of taxa and
subsequent nucleotide differences, either whole or only parts of these genes can be used in
low-level to moderately deep phylogenies.

 Some more divergent parts of the nuclear genome, mostly those non-
coding, can be used in lower-level phylogenies - such as introns, internal
transcribed spacers (ITS1, ITS2) and different classes of repetitive DNA
 Phylogeny of the Arthropoda

Onychophora

Annelid-like Tardigrada

ancestor Marellomorpha †

Arachnidomorpha(≈Chelicerata)

Crustaceomorpha

Arthropoda Next
slide
Atelocerata

These taxa are all subphyla of Arthropoda

 Phylogeny of the Mandibulata

Chelicerates (spiders, scorpions, mites etc.)

† = terrestrial origin
†
†
Crustacea

Chilopoda
Symphyla
Pauropoda
Mandibulata
Diplopoda

Atelocerata †
(possess trachea) †
Entognatha
Hexapoda
Insecta
Non-Hexapod Mandibulates

Symphla Chilopoda - centipedes

Diplopoda- millipedes Pauropoda

 Relationships among Hexapoda
Collembola

Entognatha
Protura

Hexapoda Diplura

Archaeognatha
Insecta
Thysanura

Pterygota
06/24/2022
Phylogeny of the insect orders 19