Chris A Hamilton

University of Idaho | UID · Department of Entomology Plant Pathology and Nematology

The regions of the Andes and Caribbean-Mesoamerica are both hypothesized to be the cradle for many Neotropical lineages, but few studies have fully investigated the dynamics and interactions between Neotropical bioregions. The New World hawkmoth genus Xylophanes is the most taxono-mically diverse genus in the Sphingidae, with the highest endemism a...

Planetary extinction of biodiversity underscores the need for taxonomy. Here, we scrutinize spider taxonomy over the last decade (2008–2018), compiling 2083 published accounts of newly described species. We evaluated what type of data were used to delineate species, whether data were made freely available, whether an explicit species hypothesis was...

Across insects, wing shape and size have undergone dramatic divergence even in closely related sister groups. However, we do not know how morphology changes in tandem with kinematics to support body weight within available power and how the specific force production patterns are linked to differences in behaviour. Hawkmoths and wild silkmoths are d...

One of the key objectives in biological research is understanding how evolutionary processes have produced Earth's diversity. A critical step towards revealing these processes is an investigation of evolutionary tradeoffs – that is, the opposing pressures of multiple selective forces. For millennia, nocturnal moths have had to balance successful fl...

Reconstructing biogeographic history is challenging when dispersal biology of studied species is poorly understood, and they have undergone a complex geological past. Here, we reconstruct the origin and subsequent dispersal of coin spiders (Nephilidae: Herennia Thorell), a clade of 14 species inhabiting tropical Asia and Australasia. Specifically,...

The evolution of flapping flight is linked to the prolific success of insects. Across Insecta, wing morphology diversified, strongly impacting aerodynamic performance. In the presence of ecological opportunity, discrete adaptive shifts and early bursts are two processes hypothesized to give rise to exceptional morphological diversification. Here, w...

The evolution of flapping flight is linked to the prolific success of insects. Across Insecta, wing morphology diversified, strongly impacting aerodynamic performance. In the presence of ecological opportunity, discrete adaptive shifts and early bursts are two processes hypothesized to give rise to exceptional morphological diversification. Here, w...

Molecular data are increasingly helping inform tarantula evolutionary history. This includes redefining taxonomic groups at many levels, from clarifying species limits and matching sexes to elucidating the boundaries of genera and higher taxonomic ranks. We initially overview early molecular studies with tarantulas, before more closely looking at l...

A wide diversity of wing shapes has evolved, but how is aerodynamic strategy coupled to morphological variation? Here we examine how wing shape has evolved across a phylogenetic split between hawkmoths (Sphingidae) and wild silkmoths (Saturniidae), which have divergent life histories, but agile flight behaviors. Combined with kinematics of exemplar...

We report here the discovery of a remarkable new monotypic mygalomorph spider genus, known only from one geographical location along the central coast of California. The single relict species comprising Cryptocteniza kawtakn. gen. n. sp., is morphologically distinct and geographically isolated from other related genera, with its closest phylogeneti...

A bstract One of the key objectives in biological research is understanding how evolutionary processes have produced Earth’s biodiversity. These processes have led to a vast diversity of wing shapes in insects; an unanswered question especially pronounced in moths. As one of the major predators of nocturnal moths, bats are thought to have been invo...

The infraorder Mygalomorphae is one of the three main lineages of spiders comprising over 3000 nominal species. This ancient group has a worldwide distribution that includes among its ranks large and charismatic taxa such as tarantulas, trapdoor spiders, and highly venomous funnel-web spiders. Based on past molecular studies using Sanger-sequencing...

Background: Silkmoths and their relatives constitute the ecologically and taxonomically diverse superfamily Bombycoidea, which includes some of the most charismatic species of Lepidoptera. Despite displaying spectacular forms and diverse ecological traits, relatively little attention has been given to understanding their evolution and drivers of t...

Ambulycini are a cosmopolitan tribe of the moth family Sphingidae, comprised of 10 genera, 3 of which are found in tropical Asia, 4 in the Neotropics, 1 in Africa, 1 in the Middle East, and 1 restricted to the islands of New Caledonia. Recent phylogenetic analyses of the tribe have yielded conflicting results, and some have suggested a close relati...

Instances of sexual size dimorphism (SSD) provide the context for rigorous tests of biological rules of size evolution, such as Cope's rule (phyletic size increase), Rensch's rule (allometric patterns of male and female size), as well as male and female body size optima. In certain spider groups, such as the golden orbweavers (Nephilidae), extreme...

Much genomic-scale, especially transcriptomic, data on spider phylogeny has accumulated in the last few years. These data have recently been used to investigate the diverse architectures and the origin of spider webs, concluding that the ancestral spider spun no foraging web, that spider webs evolved de novo 10-14 times, and that the orb web evolve...

The Infraorder Mygalomorphae is one of the three main lineages of spiders comprising over 3,000 nominal species. This ancient group has a world-wide distribution that includes among its ranks large and charismatic taxa such as tarantulas, trapdoor spiders, and highly venomous funnel web spiders. Based on past molecular studies using Sanger-sequenci...

Background The silkmoths and their relatives constitute the ecologically and taxonomically diverse superfamily Bombycoidea, which includes some of the most charismatic species of Lepidoptera. Despite displaying some of the most spectacular forms and ecological traits among insects, relatively little attention has been given to understanding their e...

Much genomic-scale, especially transcriptomic, data on spider phylogeny has accumulated in the last few years. These data have recently been used to investigate the diverse architectures and the origin of spider webs, concluding that the ancestral spider spun no foraging web, that spider webs evolved de novo 10-14 times, and that the orb web evolve...

Much genomic-scale, especially transcriptomic, data on spider phylogeny has accumulated in the last few years. These data have recently been used to investigate the diverse architectures and the origin of spider webs, concluding that the ancestral spider spun no foraging web, that spider webs evolved de novo 10-14 times, and that the orb web evolve...

Instances of sexual size dimorphism (SSD) provide the context for rigorous tests of biological rules of size evolution, such as Copes Rule (phyletic size increase), Renschs Rule (allometric patterns of male and female size), as well as male and female body size optima. In certain spider groups, such as the golden orbweavers (Nephilidae), extreme fe...

Prey transmit sensory illusions to redirect predatory strikes, creating a discrepancy between what a predator perceives and reality. We use the acoustic arms race between bats and moths to investigate the evolution and function of a sensory illusion. The spinning hindwing tails of silk moths (Saturniidae) divert bat attack by reflecting sonar to cr...

Mimallonidae, the sack-bearer moths, are a family of predominantly Neotropical moths containing nearly 300 described species. Mimallonidae feed on over 40 host plant families and are found in a variety of environments, but phylogenetic relationships of species within the family have never been investigated. We sequenced 515 loci using anchored hybr...

Background Bombycoidea is an ecologically diverse and speciose superfamily of Lepidoptera. The superfamily includes many model organisms, but the taxonomy and classification of the superfamily has remained largely in disarray. Here we present a global checklist of Bombycoidea. Following Zwick (2008) and Zwick et al. (2011), ten families are recogni...

Global Bombycoidea checklist

Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) are one of the most taxonomically diverse insect orders with nearly 160,000 described species. They have been studied extensively for centuries and are found on nearly all continents and in many environments. It is often assumed that adult butterflies are strictly diurnal and adult moths are strictly nocturnal, b...

We present the first genome-wide molecular phylogeny of jumping spiders (Araneae: Salticidae), inferred from Anchored Hybrid Enrichment (AHE) sequence data. From 12 outgroups plus 34 salticid taxa representing all but one subfamily and most major groups recognized in previous work, we obtained 447 loci totalling 96,946 aligned nucleotide sites. Our...

Supplementary table of assembly statistics

We present a mtDNA gene tree of tarantula spiders (Araneae: Mygalomorphae: Theraphosidae) based on the mitochondrial 16S-tRNA (leu)-ND1 gene region as a promising initial molecular hypothesis to clarify the taxonomy of the largest subfamily, Theraphosinae. Many species of this New World subfamily are traded widely as exotic pets, yet few scientific...

Background Despite considerable effort, progress in spider molecular systematics has lagged behind many other comparable arthropod groups, thereby hindering family-level resolution, classification, and testing of important macroevolutionary hypotheses. Recently, alternative targeted sequence capture techniques have provided molecular systematics a...

Butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) comprise significant portions of the world’s natural history collections, but a standardized tissue preservation protocol for molecular research is largely lacking. Lepidoptera have traditionally been spread on mounting boards to display wing patterns and colors, which are often important for species identificati...

Spiders (Order Araneae) are massively abundant generalist arthropod predators that are found in nearly every ecosystem on the planet and have persisted for over 380 million years. Spiders have long served as evolutionary models for studying complex mating and web spinning behaviors, key innovation and adaptive radiation hypotheses, and have been in...

Clustering/heatmap analysis depicting degree of shared data between each species pair Missing data reduction (matrix 3, Table 2). Degree of positive data overlap indicated by a color-coded heatmap (yellow = low, red = high); species order from right to left in the same order as listed from top to bottom on right side of figure. Lack of phylogenetic...

Clustering/heatmap analysis depicting degree of shared data between each species pair Missing data reduction (matrix 2, Table 2). Degree of positive data overlap indicated by a color-coded heatmap (yellow = low, red = high); species order from right to left in the same order as listed from top to bottom on right side of figure. Lack of phylogenetic...

Clustering/heatmap analysis depicting degree of shared data between each species pair BaCoCa reduced matrix (matrix 4, Table 2). Degree of positive data overlap indicated by a color-coded heatmap (yellow = low, red = high); species order from right to left in the same order as listed from top to bottom on right side of figure. Lack of phylogenetic...

Clustering/heatmap analysis depicting degree of shared data between each species pair Full spider ortholog matrix (matrix 1, Table 2). Degree of positive data overlap indicated by a color-coded heatmap (yellow = low, red = high); species order from right to left in the same order as listed from top to bottom on right side of figure. Lack of phyloge...

Clustering/heatmap analysis depicting degree of shared data between each species pair MARE matrix (matrix 7, Table 2). Degree of positive data overlap indicated by a color-coded heatmap (yellow = low, red = high); species order from right to left in the same order as listed from top to bottom on right side of figure. Lack of phylogenetic clustering...

Gene occupancy of matrix 3 (see Table 2) Colored squares represent partitions present in matrix for each OTU (y-axis, in descending order of OTU representation from bottom to top) and each partition or gene (x-axis, in descending order of partition representation from left to right).

Gene occupancy of matrix 7 (see Table 2) Colored squares represent partitions present in matrix for each OTU (y-axis, in descending order of OTU representation from bottom to top) and each partition or gene (x-axis, in descending order of partition representation from left to right).

Gene occupancy of matrix 5 (see Table 2) Colored squares represent partitions present in matrix for each OTU (y-axis, in descending order of OTU representation from bottom to top) and each partition or gene (x-axis, in descending order of partition representation from left to right).

Graph Level 2 Pie Chart of Molecular Function Gene Ontology molecular functions, levels 2 for OGs shared by Arthropod and Spider Core sets. Figures generated by Blast2GO analysis.

Latex source for supplemental material—including figure legends and Tables 1 and 2

Supplemental Table 3 Spider Core Ortholog Annotations. BLASTP (top hit, evalue 1E–10) of Spider Core OGs found in reference taxon (Acanthoscurria geniculata) against either (1) custom BLAST database of Stegodyphus mimosarum proteins downloaded from GenBank (BioProject Accession PRJNA222714; 27,135 protein sequences) or (2) nr, the non-redundant pro...

Clustering/heatmap analysis depicting degree of shared data between each species pair Arthropod core ortholog matrix (matrix 5, Table 2). Degree of positive data overlap indicated by a color-coded heatmap (yellow = low, red = high); species order from right to left in the same order as listed from top to bottom on right side of figure. Lack of phyl...

Gene occupancy of matrix 1 (see Table 2) Colored squares represent partitions present in matrix for each OTU (x-axis, in descending order of OTU representation from left to right) and each partition or gene (y-axis, in ascending order of partition representation).

Gene occupancy of matrix 2 (see Table 2) Colored squares represent partitions present in matrix for each OTU (x-axis, in descending order of OTU representation from left to right) and each partition or gene (y-axis, in ascending order of partition representation). Figure

Gene occupancy of matrix 4 (see Table 2) Colored squares represent partitions present in matrix for each OTU (y-axis, in descending order of OTU representation from bottom to top) and each partition or gene (x-axis, in descending order of partition representation from left to right).

Graph Level 3 Pie Chart of Molecular Function Gene Ontology molecular functions, level 3 for OGs shared by Arthropod and Spider Core sets. Figures generated by Blast2GO analysis.

Partition file for data matrix 1

Supplemental figures with legends (Table 2 omitted due to length)

Supplemental Table 2—232 pages

This systematic study documents the taxonomy, diversity, and distribution of the tarantula spider genus Aphonopelma Pocock, 1901 within the United States. By employing phylogenomic, morphological, and geospatial data, we evaluated all 55 nominal species in the United States to examine the evolutionary history of Aphonopelma and the group's taxonomy...

Compressed file (.zip) containing two separate locality datasets of Aphonopelma specimens.

Compressed files (.zip) containing Aphonopelma boxplot and PCA morphospace data.

Compressed file (.zip) containing simple R scripts for analyzing Aphonopelma morphological space.