Abstract European Lepidoptera have been subject of dense sampling for their DNA barcodes because of several active regional DNA barcoding initiatives. This intensive barcoding has revealed many cases of unexpected patterns of diversity in mitochondrial COI (Cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1) barcode region of several Lepidoptera. In this study, we generated high-throughput target enrichment data for intra-alpine populations of 4 lepidopteran species, which were known to show extraordinary but unexplained variability in their barcodes. We then compared the patterns observed from genomic data to those known from the barcodes using phylogenomics, population genetics, and species delimitation tools. Based on our findings, we revised the taxonomy of one of the studied species, ie, Symmoca signella (Hübner, 1796) species-complex with 2 new species descriptions. In the case of other 3 species—Aricia nicias, Orenaia alpestralis, and Setina aurita, we did not find clear evidence for separating intra-alpine populations into distinct species and instead found varying levels of within-species divergence between the populations. We show that the DNA barcodes alone do not always reflect the genetic structure of populations or species in an accurate manner and demonstrate the usefulness of genomic approaches for a robust delimitation of species.
Joshi et al. (Sun,) studied this question.