Moreover, while the combination of molecular with other data by Janda et al. marks an advance in the history of Lasius phylogeny, the morphological data included 33 characters (Additional File 1) that, as indicated by other studies [ 1, 2, 12, 51, 52, 60, 61], may possibly be coupled functionally with social parasitism.
This contradicts almost every other phylogenetic study which included pycnogonids (the only recent exception not based on mitochondrial genes is a combined analysis of 18S/28S sequences and morphological data, including fossils [ 28], where Pycnogonida, Acari and Palpigradi together form one clade – but with extreme character conflict).
These relationships were not recovered in cladistic analyses of morphological data that included representatives of a larger number of genera.
Only principal components explaining more than 10% of variability in morphological data were included in the analysis.
For details of how we composed our morphological data set including information on the provenance of characters and whether we excluded them, see Additional File 1. Overall, we included 64 morphological characters in our reconstructions; 35 of these concern adult workers, 18 adult queens, 23 adult males, and 2 worker larvae; 47 are binary and 17 are multi-state.
The ascertainment bias correction option (Lewis correction) was selected for partitions of morphological data, which include only variable characters.
Moreover, species delimitation of precious corals should rely on diverse sets of data, including morphological characters and proxies of reproductive isolation (e.g., genetic divergence and reproductive strategy) hopefully in association with biogeographic patterns.
This pattern persisted in the MP analysis when using the concatenated data including those morphological characters suspected to be functionally coupled with social parasitism, with one exception: the node connecting Dendrolasius to Lasius sensu stricto was then no longer supported (Fig. 2).
To take advantage of currently available models of evolution an approach to morphological data collection that includes autapomorphies may be necessary to minimize the consequences of saturation in morphological data sets.
We split the COI barcoding gene according to codon positions and obtained a character set containing only the non-constant third positions in order to ensure comparability to our morphological data, which also includes only non-constant characters.
Although previous studies of mouse lemur evolutionary diversity have included morphological data [28], [37], here we focus primarily on genetic data sampled from mtDNA and four independent nuclear loci.
