Speyeria butterflies are fast flying orange-brown butterflies that feed on violets. Our research has found they colonized North America via the Bering land bridge about five million years ago and radiated onto existing violet diversity (de Moya et al 2017). Additional phylogenetic and population genetics work in our lab supports the recognition of 16 species in North America (Thompson et al 2019). In California and across western North America we have been investigating genetic differentiation among populations and subspecies of the diverse Speyeria callippe throughout the species' range. In the Bay Area our work on S. callippe and other species indicates the DNA barcode is useful for separating species, however this is not true at larger spatial scales (Hill et al 2018). Further work involving the endangered S. callippe callippe indicates there is strong genetic differentiation among populations. Work on another California species of conservation concern, S. adiaste, resulted in the publication of the first complete life history, bringing together much biological information on this declining species (Zaman et al 2014). We also published a second paper focused on its demography and movements (Zaman et al 2015). As part of our work on the imperiled S. adiaste we tested methods for germinating seeds of the Viola hostplant V. purpurea, and also the host of S. callippe, V. pedunculata (Franklin et al 2017). We expanded our work on S. adiaste to estimate potential population size in the field by bringing together larval leaf consumption in the lab with estimates of available foodplant in the field (Hill et al 2018).
|