DNA Barcoding and Taxonomy in Diptera: A Tale of High Intraspecific Variability and Low Identification Success

DNA barcoding and DNA taxonomy have recently been proposed as solutions to the crisis of taxonomy and received significant attention from scientific journals, grant agencies, natural history museums, and mainstream media. Here, we test two key claims of molecular taxonomy using 1333 mitochondrial COI sequences for 449 species of Diptera. We investigate whether sequences can be used for species identification ("DNA barcoding") and find a relatively low success rate (