Abstract
A general goal in community ecology and evolutionary biology is to understand how diversity has arisen. In our attempts to reach such goals we become increasingly aware of interacting ecological and evolutionary processes shaping biodiversity. Ecological opportunity and adaptive radiations can, for example, drive diversification in competitive communities but little is known about how such processes propagate through trophic levels in adaptive radiation cascades. I use an eco-evolutionary model of trait-based ecological interactions and micro-evolutionary processes to investigate the macro-evolutionary aspects of predator diversification in such cascades. Prey diversification facilitates predator radiation through predator feeding opportunity and disruptive selection. Predator radiation, however, often disconnects from the prey radiation as the diversification progresses. Only when predators have an intermediate niche width, high predatory efficiency, and high evolutionary potential can radiation cascades be maintained over macro-evolutionary time scales. These results provide expectations for predator response to prey divergence and insight into eco-evolutionary feedbacks between trophic levels. Such expectations are crucial for future studies that aim for a better understanding of how diversity is generated and maintained in complex communities.
Highlights
A general goal in community ecology and evolutionary biology is to understand how diversity has arisen
A general goal in ecology and evolutionary biology is to understand how diversity is generated and maintained and it is increasingly appreciated that ecological and evolutionary processes interact in shaping natural communities[1]
Eco-evolutionary interactions that may underpin adaptive radiations in trophic communities remain elusive. It is largely unknown whether predator diversification occurs through the filling of niche space that is constituted by the distribution of already diversified prey or if predator diversification is driven by co-evolution such that prey and predator diversification is synchronized in, so-called, adaptive radiation cascades[5]
Summary
A general goal in community ecology and evolutionary biology is to understand how diversity has arisen. When predators have an intermediate niche width, high predatory efficiency, and high evolutionary potential can radiation cascades be maintained over macro-evolutionary time scales These results provide expectations for predator response to prey divergence and insight into eco-evolutionary feedbacks between trophic levels. In the context of trophic interactions, it has been shown that predation can induce disruptive selection on prey populations and drive evolutionary branching of prey[12,13,14] Such theory provides a framework for studies on ecological opportunity and adaptive radiations in a community context[15,16,17]. I match the detailed mechanistic drivers of radiations across trophic levels to a more empirically tangible measure of congruence between prey and predator phylogenetic trees
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