Taxacom: hawkmoth disjunction between Madagascar and New Caledonia

[John Grehan]

For those interested, the article below can be accessed at
https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fzoonova.afriherp.org%2F&data=05%7C02%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C10d4929a5b8545cf684f08dc8fe6684f%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638543466961557454%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=HHVPoh%2B9vwmZzIRynJMbzh44Lm0x10TxuVevYGTzyJc%3D&reserved=0 Whether one agrees or disagrees with the
content is less important than the fact that it will likely be ignored by
the molecular dispersalist Lepidoptera program, as it has ignored all other
contestations. They continue to fiddle while Rome burns around them.

  Can Gondwana vicariance, rather than Cenozoic chance dispersal, better
explain the disjunction of Ambulycini hawkmoths between Madagascar and New
Caledonia?

Abstract
The geographic disjunction between the hawkmoth genera Compsulyx in New
Caledonia and Batocnema in East Africa-Madagascar is a biogeographic
pattern shared with other plant and animal taxa, irrespective of their
individual means of dispersal. The disjunction is almost identical to a
sister species relationship in the plant genus Acridocarpus
(Malpighiaceae), similar to Cunonia (Cunoniaceae) in New Caledonia and
South Africa, and comparable to Dietes (Iridaceae) on Lord Howe Island and
Madagascar/East Africa. These and other geographic disjunctions represent
scattered elements of the numerous trans-Indian Ocean connections involving
more widespread taxa, some with distributions that include the Pacific. The
biogeographic patterns are consistent with Mesozoic tectonic events that
disrupted the continuity of widespread ancestral distributions. The
tectonic correlations are not in conflict with younger fossil or island
calibrated molecular divergence ages that represent minimum estimates only.
And they provide a potential falsification of centres of origin and chance
dispersal models generated by ancestral-areas programmes

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link, then the 'Ghost Moth Research page' link.