Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Brown, Richard L.

Committee Member

Outlaw, Diana C.

Committee Member

Baker, Gerald T.

Committee Member

Goddard, Jerome

Date of Degree

8-11-2017

Document Type

Graduate Thesis - Open Access

Major

Entomology

Degree Name

Master of Science

College

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences

Department

Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Entomology and Plant Pathology

Abstract

A comprehensive review of whole mount staining revealed an enhanced staining method to improve visibility of morphological structures. Ultimately, five factors vital to stain quality were identified, with pH being a primary factor. Phylogenetic relationships of all 22 tribes of Tortricidae, representing 57 genera and 78 species (distributed in Neotropical, Nearctic, Palearctic, Oriental, and Australian regions), were investigated based on 52 morphological characters, including incorporation of 27 novel non-traditional characters of the endo- and exoskeleton. The phylogenetic analysis yielded five equally parsimonious trees (length 389 steps, CI=0.2571, RI=0.7051), a strict consensus (length 392 steps, CI=0.2551, RI= 0.7021) of which produced two trichotomies. These results reinforced those from previous molecular analyses (Fagua et al., 2016; Regier et al., 2016) with some disagreement, consistent with historical conclusions made based on morphology. Mapping character distribution onto a recent molecular based phylogeny (Regier et al., 2012) revealed promising characters for subfamily and tribal delimitation

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/21138

Comments

stains||endoskeleton||de-scaled moths||systematics||histology

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