Ricerc@Sapienza

Two Cordulegaster dragonflies present in Italy, the Palaearctic and northern distributed Cordulegaster boltonii and the endemic to the south of the peninsula Cordulegaster trinacriae, meet in central Italy and give rise to individuals of intermediate morphology. By means of mitochondrial and nuclear markers and of Geometric Morphometrics applied to sexual appendages, we defined i) the geographical boundaries between the two species in Italy and ii) we determined the presence, the extent, and the genetic characteristics of the hybridization.

Impacts of introgressive hybridisation may range from genomic erosion and species collapse to rapid
adaptation and speciation but opportunities to study these dynamics are rare. We investigated the
extent, causes and consequences of a hybrid zone between Anopheles coluzzii and Anopheles gambiae
in Guinea-Bissau, where high hybridisation rates appear to be stable at least since the 1990s. Anopheles
gambiae was genetically partitioned into inland and coastal subpopulations, separated by a central