A MUSEOMIC AND MORPHOLOGICAL APPROACH FOR THE TYPES OF AGYLLA WALKER, 1854 DEPOSITED IN EUROPEAN MUSEUMS (EREBIDAE, ARCTIINAE, LITHOSIINI)

• Grant number: 25/12360-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: January 12, 2026
• End date: January 11, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Biological Sciences - Zoology - Taxonomy of Recent Groups
• Principal Investigator: Simeão de Souza Moraes
• Grantee: Georgette Paola Ancajima Alcalde
• Supervisor: Marianne Espeland
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biologia (IB). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Zoologisches Forschungsmuseum Alexander Koenig - Leibniz-Institut Für Biodiversität Der Tiere, Germany
• Associated to the scholarship: 24/01515-9 - EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY AND BIOGEOGRAPHY OF LICHEN MOTHS OF THE GENUS Agylla WALKER, 1854 (EREBIDAE, ARCTIINAE, LITHOSIINI), BP.DR

Abstract

The impacts of climate change on biodiversity are incalculable. Efforts to quantify and understand the loss of fauna have inspired ways to measure them. In this sense, seven shortfalls of biodiversity have been proposed, the most important of which are those that quantify the number of species (Linnaean shortfall), evolutionary relationships (Darwinian shortfall), and geographic distribution (Wallacean shortfall). By filling these information gaps, we will be able to better understand biodiversity and how it is being affected by anthropogenic changes over time. Museums are libraries that allow us to look into the past, and new molecular techniques, such as museomics, allow us to access genomic information from specimens collected in the 19th century. This new era brings possibilities for studying phylogenetic relationships in a way that, until recently, was unimaginable. However, even though museomics brings the possibility of new phylogenetic perspectives, we cannot disconnect it from morphology, which helps us better understand evolutionary patterns and allows us to see congruences between data of different natures, giving more explanatory power to the generated hypotheses. In this work, we will use genomic and morphological data to generate relationships hypotheses for species of the genus Agylla, studying the types specimens deposited in European museums. To achieve this objective, three European collections where types of Agylla are deposited will be visited, from which we will obtain genomic DNA via museomics for a phylogenetic tree and we will use morphological data that will be enlightening for the taxonomy of Agylla and in the completion of an illustrated catalog for the species included in the genus.