The Exoporia are a group of primitive

Lepidoptera Lepidoptera ( ) or lepidopterans is an order (biology), order of winged insects which includes butterflies and moths. About 180,000 species of the Lepidoptera have been described, representing 10% of the total described species of living organ ...

comprising the superfamilies Mnesarchaeoidea and Hepialoidea.Nielsen, E.S., Robinson, G.S. and Wagner, D.L. 2000. Ghost-moths of the world: a global inventory and bibliography of the Exoporia (Mnesarchaeoidea and Hepialoidea) (Lepidoptera) ''Journal of Natural History'', 34(6): 823-878. They are a natural group or

clade In biology, a clade (), also known as a Monophyly, monophyletic group or natural group, is a group of organisms that is composed of a common ancestor and all of its descendants. Clades are the fundamental unit of cladistics, a modern approach t ...

. Exoporia is the

sister group In phylogenetics, a sister group or sister taxon, also called an adelphotaxon, comprises the closest relative(s) of another given unit in an evolutionary tree. Definition The expression is most easily illustrated by a cladogram: Taxon A and ...

of the lepidopteran infraorder Heteroneura. They are characterised by their unique female reproductive system which has an external groove between the ostium bursae and the ovipore by which the

sperm Sperm (: sperm or sperms) is the male reproductive Cell (biology), cell, or gamete, in anisogamous forms of sexual reproduction (forms in which there is a larger, female reproductive cell and a smaller, male one). Animals produce motile sperm ...

is transferred to the egg rather than having the mating and egg-laying parts of the

abdomen The abdomen (colloquially called the gut, belly, tummy, midriff, tucky, or stomach) is the front part of the torso between the thorax (chest) and pelvis in humans and in other vertebrates. The area occupied by the abdomen is called the abdominal ...

with a common opening ( cloaca) as in other nonditrysian moths, or with separate openings linked internally by a "ductus seminalis" as in the Ditrysia. See Kristensen (1999: 57) for other exoporian characteristics.

References

*IV Arthropoda: Insecta Teilband / Part 35: 491 pp. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, New York.

External links

Tree of Life

Abstract
Moth taxonomy Insect infraorders Neolepidoptera {{moth-stub

See also

References

External links