Okay, so who are the ancestors? What are their traits? I don't have names for them at the moment, but their traits, based on the resulting generation of most likely ancestral traits created by the phylogeny program, are the following:
Data/methods below the cut, as well as a (brief) dive into evolutionary history for Beetle-Night Hybrids and why I want some history on Beetles lol
Night-Beetle Hybrids and HiveWings
Before anyone gets on my tail about BeetleWings evolving before HiveWings and Hives being hybrids of NightWings and BeetleWings, I'm not a huge fan of that in canon, but don't mind the interbreeding in general. I just mind the genetic bottleneck that would have occurred with only one NightWing (Clearsight) breeding with a BeetleWing and their offspring resulting in a completely new species. Now, mutations can arise, and maybe NightWing traits were dominant in passing, but for a whole new species to arise from a single generation of interbreeding with a single pair of mates, it doesn't really make sense, especially since BeetleWing traits were (presumably) selected for their environment.
Selection occurs based on the following:
1) Environmental adaptation (species with traits more suited to the environment will live longer and be able to reproduce more)
2) Mutations (the rate is slow over time, but adds up over LONG time scales as alleles accumulate in populations)
3) Migration (Low migration rates (such as occurred in Pantala) mean that genetic drift, selection, and mutation occur independently between populations, ie, what happens in the BeetleWing/NightWing populations won't affect the other, genetically, due to low interbreeding)
Basically, with only a SINGLE Nightwing individual, and assuming there was no prior cross breeding, there MUST'VE been an extinction event that removed the pool of pure BeetleWings from the population, otherwise the proportion of BN to BB should have stayed the same over time (Hardy-Weinberg principles). This, obviously, isn't the case. As far as we know in canon though, they simply dissapeared. My evolutionary biology brain needs some history. Alas, I'll write my own (mwahaha). Don't even get me started on genetic bottlenecks lol. Biology is CRAZY.
Tree Creation
The tree was generated based on species traits assigned as base pair markers on DNA with one base pair indicating a 1 (trait present) or a 0 (trait not present)! Since phylogenies can't be built with 1s and 0s, I randomly assigned ACTG to them, being sure to make all of the traits that were 1s into the same letter in a single column to ensure it was (hopefully) denoted as present.
The traits
Green indicates a trait is present (would have been a 1), while white is not present (0)
