Apodrosus

Apodrosus is a genus of Caribbean weevils with 22 currently known species. I revised the genus as part of my Master's thesis and made a blog about the process.

One of the good and unexpected things that happened with this blog, is that I was able to reach another entimine worker all across the world: http://the-praise-of-insects.blogspot.com/2010/11/apodrosus-revision-and-blog.html

This genus has tons of mysteries to unveil. It belongs to the tribe Polydrusini, which is most diverse in the Holarctic region, with a few species distributed in the New World, some of those in Central America. When it was first described by Marshall, he pointed out affinities with Polydrusus (a giant and messy Holarctic group). The morphological affinities I found, which are part of the phylogeny presented in the Girón & Franz 2010 paper, resulted in a closer relationship of Apodrosus with Anypotactus (tribe Anypotactini, exclusively Neotropical) than to the polydrusines included in that study, which casts doubt about the taxonomic placement of Apodrosus. Also, two groups of species were obtained: one low-land and one high-land.

Anderson & Zhang (2017) incorporated a molecular phylogeny for some of the species including an assortment of Nearctic Polydrusus and Caribbean entimines. They found a sister relationship between Apodrosus and Polydrusus, but no Anypotactus were included in the study, due to a lack of molecular data and of DNA grade specimens.

Even though Apodrosus resulted closer to Nearctic Polydrusus than to any of the Caribbean entimines tested, for me the placement of Apodrosus among the Polydrusini is still to be tested, but next time against Anypotactus. Given the morphological affinities found (two synapomorphies plus, three homoplasious characters out of 25 coded characters, which I will admit may not result as decisive as the 4539 bp, 6 gene dataset), and the distributions of the groups in question, I still think Apodrosus might be more closely related to the Anypotactini than to the Polydrusini.

Until now, no anypotactines have been included in molecular phylogenies, so it remains possible that Anypotactini and Polydrusini might be closely related.