Getting western: biogeographical analysis of morphological variation, mitochondrial haplotypes and nuclear markers reveals cryptic species and hybrid zones in the Junonia butterflies of the American southwest and Mexico

The American southwest and northern Mexico has a great degree of endemic diversity compared with the rest of North America. The Pleistocene glaciations and the dispersal of species from glacial refuges in this region have been important engines for the production of biodiversity in the region. The New World Junonia are a recent radiation of butterflies that are thought to have spent time in these refuges during periods of glacial advancement. We have reconstructed the plausible movements and the contemporary geographic distributions of the five taxa ( J. coenia , J. grisea , J. litoralis , J. nigrosuffusa and J. zonalis ) that occur in the American southwest and northern Mexico using phenotypic and genotypic information primarily from specimens preserved in museum collections, supplemented with additional contemporary collections. Evidence of cryptic species and hybridization events were observed using mitochondrial haplotypes, genotypic variation at the nuclear wingless locus, multilocus DNA fingerprinting, patterns of larval host plant use, variation in life‐history traits and morphological characteristics. Based on these lines of evidence, and in spite of low levels of hybridization between them, we argue that all five Junonia taxa are independent evolutionary lineages. Junonia grisea and J. coenia are morphologically very similar, but differences in morphology, life‐history traits, nuclear genotypes and mitochondrial haplotypes suggest that they are a cryptic species pair, thus elevating J. grisea comb.n. to a full species when it had previously been considered to be a subspecies of J. coenia .