Manticores and Giant Tigers: Phylogeny and biogeography of the tiger beetle tribe Manticorini (Coleoptera: Cicindelidae)

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Members of the tribe Manticorini are among the most poorly known tiger beetles in the United States. Estimates of the number of species in one genus ranges from as few as five to over a hundred. All manticorine tiger beetles are large, nocturnal, and flightless, yet they are found on three different continents. How did large, flightless beetles come to occur on continents separated by an ocean? In the American Southwest, a similar pattern exists among populations of the Montane Giant Tiger Beetle. Individuals are found only at mid-elevations on isolated mountains in the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, but none of the intervening low desert. However, this latter distribution pattern likely emerged more recently in Earth’s history than the former involving multiple continents. This project will investigate species diversity and the origins of the distributions of manticorine tiger beetles. Understanding the number of species in this group and their ranges will aid conservation efforts. This project will use museum specimens to assess whether current molecular tools can incorporate long-dead individuals into studies of evolutionary history. These results will aid in determining how best to use museum specimens from extinct or endangered populations in future studies. Community science and public outreach will be employed to collect specimens from across species’ ranges, which will increase regional scientific literacy. This project will mentor graduate and undergraduate students in modern systematics methods. The results of this research will be used to enrich teaching materials for biology courses taught at a Hispanic Serving Institution. This project will involve fieldwork to sample populations of manticorine tiger beetles from across the ranges of currently proposed species and subspecies within the U.S. Sampling will include attempts to re-collecting populations known from museum specimens. A targeted capture and enrichment approach to high-throughput DNA sequencing will be employed using an ultraconserved element probe set. This probe set was designed specifically for use in the beetle suborder to which manticorine tiger beetles belong. Using the resultant data, phylogenetic trees will be constructed in order to delimit species boundaries, reconstruct ancestral ranges, and assess phylogenetic placement of museum specimens. These results will be used to revise the taxonomy of U.S. manticorines and reconstruct their historical biogeography. Once species-level taxa have been identified, they will be included in a phylogenomic and biogeographic analysis of the entire tribe Manticorini.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.