Abaeis gratiosa (E. Doubleday, 1847)

Zhang, Jing, Cong, Qian, Shen, Jinhui, Song, Leina & Grishin, Nick V., 2023, Butterfly classification and species discovery using genomics, The Taxonomic Report of the International Lepidoptera Survey 11 (3), pp. 1-94 : 8

Abaeis gratiosa (E. Doubleday, 1847) and Abaeis angulata (Wallengren, 1860) are species-level taxa, not subspecies of Abaeis arbela (Geyer, 1832)

Genomic sequencing of taxa treated as subspecies of Eurema arbela Geyer, 1832 (type locality in “Java”, possibly southern Brazil) in Lamas (2004), currently in the genus Abaeis Hübner, [1819] (type species Papilio nicippe Cramer, 1779 ) (Zhang et al. 2019b), confirms that Abaeis boisduvaliana (C. Felder & R. Felder, 1865) (type locality in Mexico) is a distinct species due to its genetic differentiation from A. arbela ( Fig. 4 green and red). E.g., its COI barcode is 3.3% (22 bp) different. Moreover, we find that Abaeis gratiosa (E. Doubleday, 1847) , stat. rest. (type locality in Venezuela) and Abaeis angulata (Wallengren, 1860) , stat. rest. (type locality not given, likely in Ecuador) are prominently differentiated genetically from A. arbela , A. boisduvaliana , and each other both in nuclear and mitochondrial genomes ( Fig. 4) and, therefore, are best treated as distinct species. Fst / Gmin /COI difference for the pairs of closest (in nuclear genome) relatives are: A. gratiosa and A. arbela : 0.21/0.01/3.5% (23 bp) and A. angulata and A. boisduvaliana : 0.64/0.001/3.6% (24 bp).