Museomics and morphology help to decode the evolutionary history of noctuid moths

Noctuoidea is one of the most controversial superfamilies in the order Lepidoptera due the problematic classification of its 42,000 known species, which were previously placed into six families. Among these families, Noctuidae has been used as a “trash can” family for many noctuoid taxa of uncertain placement. Unfortunately, most phylogenetic studies of this family had poor taxon sampling or used very few genes, and also lacked morphology-based support of their hypotheses. In order to better understand the evolutionary history of this family, we generated a phylogenomic dataset that includes 400 loci from 120 noctuid specimens, representing 21 of the 23 known subfamilies, and 31 outgroups from the other families of Noctoidea. Roughly 75% of the noctuid sequences in our dataset were newly obtained from dried museum specimens using anchored hybrid enrichment, and these data were merged with previously published noctuoid genomes from GenBank. Using maximum likelihood and multi-species coalescent analyses, we produced a phylogeny with strongly supported relationships of higher-level groups in Noctuidae. We also used 58 morphological characters to independently support the results of our molecular analyses. Our results indicate that six noctuid subfamilies (Pantheinae, Balsinae, Plusiinae, Dyopsinae, Raphiinae, and Dilobinae) and one subfamily of Nolidae (Diphtherinae) must be elevated to family in order to maintain monophyly of the existing Noctuoidea families. This work demonstrates the necessity of further revisionary work on all families of Noctuoidea, especially Noctuidae. It also highlights the importance of museum collections as sources to help answer evolutionary questions.