Journal of Heredity 2004:95(2):97-102
© 2004 The American Genetic Association
Allelic Melanism in American and British Peppered Moths
From the Department of Biology, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795. I thank Wenda Smith Ribeiro for backcrossing hybrid moths to parva, Cornelia Grant for feeding caterpillars, and Jewel Thomas for photographing specimens. I am especially indebted to Dr. Takahiro Asami for trapping and supplying the parva stock, and Dr. Soichiro Kinoshita for permission to use his photographs of parva. Two anonymous reviewers kindly helped me improve the manuscript. This article is dedicated to the memory of Sir Cyril A. Clarke, whose extraordinary multidisciplinary career included amassing the largest continuous chronicle of melanic evolution on record.
Address correspondence to B. S. Grant at the address above, or e-mail: Geometrid{at}aol.com.
Parallel evolutionary changes in the incidence of melanism are well documented in widely geographically separated subspecies of the peppered moth (Biston betularia). The British melanic phenotype (f. carbonaria) and the American melanic phenotype (f. swettaria) are indistinguishable in appearance, and previous genetic analysis has established that both are inherited as autosomal dominants. This report demonstrates through hybridizations of the subspecies and Mendelian testcrosses of melanic progeny that carbonaria and swettaria are phenotypes produced by alleles (isoalleles) at a single locus. The possibility of close linkage at two loci remains, but the simpler one-locus model cannot be rejected in the absence of contrary evidence.
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