Evolution of the aquatic beetle family Noteridae (Coleoptera: Adephaga): integrating methods to examine patterns of diversification across temporal scales.
type: CreativeWork
description: Parsing the evolutionary patterns and processes that underly beetle diversity has been the subject of countless investigations. With an estimated crown age of 300 million years and millions of species, beetle evolution has unfolded over broad temporal and spatial scales. My dissertation focuses on the evolution of the aquatic beetle family Noteridae (Coleoptera: Adephaga). By integrating a wide variety of methods, I investigate patterns of noterid evolution across hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary time, from major lineages over 250 million years old, to the level of species and populations, potentially less than 1 million years old. Adephaga has been the subject of many phylogenetic investigations using a variety of data types, without strong consensus on the relationships of its aquatic members. We conducted the first phylogenomic study of Adephaga with ultraconserved elements (UCEs). UCEs are captured by targeted, probe-based, enrichment and subsequent next-gen sequencing, and are known for effective phylogenetic reconstructions at both deep and shallow time scales. Capturing over 300 loci, we showed that aquatic adephagans, or ‘Hydradephaga’, are not monophyletic and further proved the efficacy of UCEs for coleopteran phylogenomics. As Adephaga is the parent suborder of Noteridae, this chapter is provided a contextual and methodological basis for my dissertation research. Within Noteridae, the subfamily of minute beetles, Notomicrinae, presents a partial Gondwanan distribution, occupying Oceania, Indomalaya and the New World. My dissertation research shows that several species in the largest genus of the group, Notomicrus, are yet undescribed, and the subfamily displays a wide range of habitat preference among species with varying degrees of specificity. To investigate these patterns, we constructed a Sanger-based dataset of five markers and robust sampling of Notomicrinae, with a strong emphasis on New World species of Notomicrus. We used this to rec…
abstract: Parsing the evolutionary patterns and processes that underly beetle diversity has been the subject of countless investigations. With an estimated crown age of 300 million years and millions of species, beetle evolution has unfolded over broad temporal and spatial scales. My dissertation focuses on the evolution of the aquatic beetle family Noteridae (Coleoptera: Adephaga). By integrating a wide variety of methods, I investigate patterns of noterid evolution across hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary time, from major lineages over 250 million years old, to the level of species and populations, potentially less than 1 million years old. Adephaga has been the subject of many phylogenetic investigations using a variety of data types, without strong consensus on the relationships of its aquatic members. We conducted the first phylogenomic study of Adephaga with ultraconserved elements (UCEs). UCEs are captured by targeted, probe-based, enrichment and subsequent next-gen sequencing, and are known for effective phylogenetic reconstructions at both deep and shallow time scales. Capturing over 300 loci, we showed that aquatic adephagans, or ‘Hydradephaga’, are not monophyletic and further proved the efficacy of UCEs for coleopteran phylogenomics. As Adephaga is the parent suborder of Noteridae, this chapter is provided a contextual and methodological basis for my dissertation research. Within Noteridae, the subfamily of minute beetles, Notomicrinae, presents a partial Gondwanan distribution, occupying Oceania, Indomalaya and the New World. My dissertation research shows that several species in the largest genus of the group, Notomicrus, are yet undescribed, and the subfamily displays a wide range of habitat preference among species with varying degrees of specificity. To investigate these patterns, we constructed a Sanger-based dataset of five markers and robust sampling of Notomicrinae, with a strong emphasis on New World species of Notomicrus. We used this to rec…
author: Baca, Stephen M
language: en
keywords: Entomology, Systematic biology, Genetics, Biogeography, Neotropics, Phylogenetics, Phylogenomics, Taxonomy, Ultraconserved Elements
date published: 2021-12-31
date modified: 2026-07-24T02:44:56Z
provider: University of Kansas
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Kansas

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/1808/35346