Progress on the phylogeny of caddisflies (Trichoptera)

Abstract

We present our current phylogenetic hypothesis on the phylogeny of Trichoptera, generated from an analysis of over 7000 nucleotides from 18S and 28S rRNA, EF-1α, COI, and CAD. We corroborate our earlier hypotheses, with results that include a monophyletic Annulipalpia, Integripalpia, Brevitentoria, and Plenitentoria. Monophyly of Psychomyioidea, Pseudoneureclipsidae, and Grumichellinae were confirmed. The "Spicipalpian" families were again found to be paraphyletic, and most closely related to Integripalpia. Ptilocolepidae was not found to be monophyletic, but support for its paraphyly was so weak that we interpret our results as unresolved. We interpret our measures of branch support, and present a collapsed phylogeny that more conservatively represents our current hypothesis. We discuss how these data can eventually be merged into other sources of data, such as COI barcode data and transcriptomes, and suggest that a single huge analysis of all data, with all taxa, is unnecessary if analyses can be phylogenetically subdivided into many separate parts, using transcriptome data to fix the deepest nodes, and allowing faster evolving data to be more appropriately targeted to nodes closer to the tips of the tree.