Ecomorphological variation of the wireworm cephalic capsule: studying the interaction of environment and geometric shape.

Hugo A Benítez,Antonela Kozina,Thomas Püschel,Darija Lemic,Renata Bažok,Maja Čačija,Hector Escriva

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0102059

Hugo A Benítez, Antonela Kozina + Show 5 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0102059

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Abstract

Studying the association between organismal morphology and environmental conditions has been very useful to test hypothesis regarding the influence of climate on shape. It has been long recognized that different environments produce dissimilar stress levels in insects, which can be reflected on the ability of an individual to overcome these pressures and spread further. Agriotes (Coleoptera: Elateridae) species infest agricultural fields in different parts of Croatia, inhabiting different climatic conditions. Previous biological studies have indicated that there is a relationship between some Agriotes biological parameters such as density and climatic conditions such as soil moisture and temperature. However, it is still unknown how these environmental properties influence the wireworm morphological structure. This is highly relevant because the head of this species is directly involved in the mobility in the soil, thus affecting the invasive capacity of this insect. Therefore the aim of this study was to assess the association between different climatic conditions and the morphological variation of Agriotes cephalic capsule. Advanced multivariate analysis and geometric morphometric tool were applied to study the covariation between shape and environmental variables. Partial Least Squares methods were used in order to analyse the association between the wireworm head shape and three different climatic conditions: soil type, temperature and rainfall. Our results showed that there is a high covariation between the wireworm head shape and the climatic conditions. It was suggested that the observed shape–environment association could be result of the high plasticity of this species in relation to its invasive capacity.

Highlights

Taxonomic classification and biological diversity analyses have been traditionally based on morphological descriptions [1]
The Procrustes ANOVA applied to assess the measurement error showed that the mean square for individual variation exceeded the measurement error; it was negligible (Table 2)
The eight populations were distinguished according to the relative displacement of the symmetric landmarks 1, 2–5, 6 and 9– 10

Summary

Introduction

Taxonomic classification and biological diversity analyses have been traditionally based on morphological descriptions [1]. One of the great characteristics of GMM is that it allows studying the association between shape and other kinds of data, such as ecological, genetic, biomechanical, or other relevant factors. Ecomorphological studies have revealed constraints and selective factors affecting the phenotypic response to certain environments [7,8,9], how morphology influences the ecological distribution of a particular phenotype [10,11,12,13] and evolutionary trends such as phylogenetically conserved morphologies [11,14,15,16] In all these cases, morphology represents certain organismal aspects that relate and individual to its environment, its importance. It has been used to relate morphometric and ecological variables [5,13,18,19,20], morphometric and allele frequency data [21], shape and behavior [18], different parts of the same configuration of landmarks [21,22,23], and even data from different parts or different views of the same specimens [24,25]

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