Oraidium Bethune-Baker, 1914

Zhang, Jing, Cong, Qian, Shen, Jinhui, Song, Leina & Grishin, Nick V., 2024, Taxonomic advances driven by the genomic analysis of butterflies, The Taxonomic Report of the International Lepidoptera Survey 11 (7), pp. 1-43 : 24

Oraidium Bethune-Baker, 1914 is a subgenus of Brephidium Scudder, 1876

Genomic analysis of all valid species of Oraidium Bethune-Baker, 1914 (type species Lycaena barberae Trimen, 1868 ) and Brephidium Scudder, 1876 (type species Lycaena exilis Boisduval, 1852 ), including all but one subspecies, reveals three groups that are approximately equidistant from each other genetically ( Fig. 19 blue, purple, and red). Moreover, as the nuclear tree from autosomal codons suggests, Brephidium may be paraphyletic with respect to Oraidium , and the two African species of the group form Similar, although less confident, grouping is seen in the mitochondrial genome tree ( Fig. 19c). The COI barcode difference between the type species of Oraidium and Brephidium is 6.1% (40 bp), compared to somewhat larger difference between Brephidium metophis (Wallengren, 1860) and Brephidium exilis (Boisduval, 1852) of 8.1% (53 bp), also indicating approximately equal distance between these three species ( Fig. 19). These results may reflect the actual relationship, implying fast evolution in genitalia of Oraidium , or caused by more frequent introgression between African species that resulted in convergent overall genetic similarity. Regardless of the evolutionary scenario, we do not see strong genomic support for maintaining Oraidium as a distinct genus. Moreover, the two African species, B. metophis and O. barberae , are quite similar to each other in wing patterns and are frequently misidentified (iNaturalist 2023). Nevertheless, Oraidium possesses distinct genitalia (Bethune-Baker 1914; Stempffer 1967), and instead of synonymizing it with Brephidium , we propose to treat Oraidium Bethune-Baker, 1914 , stat. nov. as a subgenus of Brephidium Scudder, 1876 .