Two recent studies by Andrew Zamoroka – an Associate Professor of our Department, and his colleagues have revealed a remarkable story of survival, separation, and evolution hidden within one of Europe’s rarest beetles – Phytoecia (Pilemia) tigrina. Once thought to be a single species scattered across central and eastern Europe, this longhorn beetle with tiger-like markings turns out to carry a genetic signature of an ancient climatic drama that unfolded more than a million years ago.
Protected by European and Ukrainian conservation laws, Ph. tigrina inhabits dry meadows and steppe-like grasslands – habitats now vanishing under modern agriculture. Yet even within its remaining refuges, scientists noticed a mystery: beetles from the western side of the Carpathians looked and behaved differently from those on the eastern underhills.
Zamoroka’s team combined ecological modeling, morphology, and DNA barcoding to uncover why. Their two studies (see here and here) revealed that the Carpathian Mountains divide the beetle’s range into two distinct evolutionary lineages. Western populations from Pannonia and Transylvania are smaller, with rounded heads and short mandibles; eastern ones from Podillya and Moldavian Highlands are larger, with elongated jaws. Genetic tests confirmed the pattern: the two lineages differ by up to 7% in the COI mitochondrial gene — a gap wide enough to justify recognizing them as separate subspecies.
Thus, the team formally described the eastern form as Phytoecia (Pilemia) tigrina podillica Zamoroka, Ruicănescu & Manci, 2024, while the western population retains the name Ph. tigrina tigrina (Mulsant, 1851). The divergence, the researchers found, dates back about 1.2 million years, during the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, when glacial cycles became longer and harsher. Trapped in different climatic refuges – one in the Pannonian Basin, the other near the ancient Aegean region – the two lineages evolved apart while Europe’s ice sheets advanced and retreated.
As the glaciers melted about 10,000 years ago, grasslands reappeared and the beetles recolonized the Carpathian foothills. Yet later climate shifts and forest expansion again fragmented their range, isolating them into the patchwork of populations that persists today. Each metapopulation, Zamoroka notes, represents “a genetic time capsule – a living record of how the Earth’s climate once divided, and later reconnected, life across the continent.”
The case of Phytoecia tigrina shows how mountains and ice can shape evolution even in small insects. It also warns that the same forces – now accelerated by human activity – could erase the fragile habitats that preserve these ancient genetic lineages. Zamoroka’s continuing research aims to trace all ten known metapopulations of the species across Europe and western Asia, piecing together the full evolutionary map of this tiny yet remarkable survivor of the Ice Age.