Abstract
Insects contain more than half of all living species, but the causes of their remarkable diversity remain poorly understood. Many authors have suggested that herbivory has accelerated diversification in many insect clades. However, others have questioned the role of herbivory in insect diversification. Here, we test the relationships between herbivory and insect diversification across multiple scales. We find a strong, positive relationship between herbivory and diversification among insect orders. However, herbivory explains less variation in diversification within some orders (Diptera, Hemiptera) or shows no significant relationship with diversification in others (Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, Orthoptera). Thus, we support the overall importance of herbivory for insect diversification, but also show that its impacts can vary across scales and clades. In summary, our results illuminate the causes of species richness patterns in a group containing most living species, and show the importance of ecological impacts on diversification in explaining the diversity of life.
Highlights
For Diptera, we used the data on phylogeny, divergence times, species richness and diets for dipteran families (B90% sampled, B97% of species included) provided by Wiegmann et al.[13]
We tested for a relationship between diversification rates and herbivory among clades using PGLS20 to account for the phylogenetic non-independence of clades
We present Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) values as an alternative approach to assessing statistical significance
Summary
For Diptera, we used the data on phylogeny, divergence times, species richness and diets for dipteran families (B90% sampled, B97% of species included) provided by Wiegmann et al.[13]. Some minor modifications were necessary (see Methods in Supplementary Information). We followed Wiegmann et al.[13] and coded families as herbivorous if they were listed as herbivorous (phytophagous) in their Fig. 1. We estimated diversification rates for each family using the method-of-moment estimator for stem ages[19], and tested for a relationship between herbivory and diversification rates using PGLS (see above). The tree used in these analyses is shown in nexus format in Supplementary Data 5 and data on species richness, herbivory, stem ages and diversification rates are shown in Supplementary Table 13. The results are shown in Supplementary Table 1
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