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Field Experiments of Pollination Ecology: The Case of Lycoris sanguinea var. sanguinea
Published on: November 25, 2016
Host insect specificity and interspecific competition drive parasitoid diversification in a plant-insect community
Ai-Ying Wang1, Yan-Qiong Peng2, James M Cook3
1State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Biodiversity Science and Ecological Engineering, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
Abstract:
Ecological interactions among plants, insect herbivores, and parasitoids are pervasive in nature and play important roles in community assembling, but the codiversification of tri-trophic interactions has received less attention. Here we compare pairwise codiversification patterns between a set of 22 fig species, their herbivorous pollinating and galling wasps, and their parasitoids. The parasitoid phylogeny showed significant congruence and more cospeciation events with host insects phylogeny than with host plants. These results suggest that parasitoid phylogeny and speciation is more closely related to their host insects than to their host plants. The pollinating wasps hosted more parasitoid species than gallers and indicated a more intense interspecific competition among parasitoids associated with pollinators. Closer matching and fewer evolutionary host shifts were found between parasitoids and galler hosts than between parasitoids and pollinator hosts. These results suggest that interspecific competition among parasitoids, rather than resource availability of host wasps, is the main driver of the codiversification pattern in this community. Therefore, our study highlights the important role of interspecific competition among high trophic level insects in plant-insect tri-trophic community assembling.
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