Phylogeny of the Hymenoptera: a reanalysis of the Ronquist et al . (1999) reanalysis, emphasizing wing venation and apocritan relationships

Ronquist et al . (1999) recoded Rasnitsyn’s (1988) analysis to effect an explicit numerical cladistic analysis of his data. Here we examine their analysis and reveal that much of the resolution obtained for apocritan relationships is dependant on reductional wing characters. The wing characters in their matrix are replaced with a revised set of wing characters and reanalysed using strict parsimony. For apocritan taxa the resulting strict consensus tree is considerably less resolved, but perhaps preferable as a more conservative starting point in the continuing investigation of higher level hymenopteran relationships.