Abstract
Acoustic communication is enabled by the evolution of specialised hearing and sound producing organs. In this study, we performed a large-scale macroevolutionary study to understand how both hearing and sound production evolved and affected diversification in the insect order Orthoptera, which includes many familiar singing insects, such as crickets, katydids, and grasshoppers. Using phylogenomic data, we firmly establish phylogenetic relationships among the major lineages and divergence time estimates within Orthoptera, as well as the lineage-specific and dynamic patterns of evolution for hearing and sound producing organs. In the suborder Ensifera, we infer that forewing-based stridulation and tibial tympanal ears co-evolved, but in the suborder Caelifera, abdominal tympanal ears first evolved in a non-sexual context, and later co-opted for sexual signalling when sound producing organs evolved. However, we find little evidence that the evolution of hearing and sound producing organs increased diversification rates in those lineages with known acoustic communication.
Highlights
Acoustic communication is enabled by the evolution of specialised hearing and sound producing organs
We thoroughly explored the signal in the phylogenomic data by creating and analysing six phylogenomic data sets differing in the level of matrix saturation, character coding, and data size in a maximum likelihood framework
The six data sets resulted in largely congruent topologies in terms of family-level relationships, but the phylogenetic placements of Rhaphidophoridae, Gryllotalpidae and Pamphagidae varied among the resulting trees
Summary
Acoustic communication is enabled by the evolution of specialised hearing and sound producing organs. As for insects, the ability to hear using tympanal ears has independently evolved at least in seven different orders (Orthoptera, Mantodea, Hemiptera, Neuroptera, Coleoptera, Lepidoptera and Diptera), involving at least 15 body locations[10,11,12,13]. Early forms of stridulatory organs could have evolved as a defensive mechanism[6], as part of a deimatic behaviour These hearing and sound-producing organs could have led to the evolution of sexual signalling via the so-called ‘sensory bias’ mechanism, in which male sexual signals evolve from structures originally involved in a non-sexual context that females already have perception for, in a nonsexual context[11]. A phylogenetic pattern consistent with this sensory bias mechanism would be that, in a given lineage, the evolution of one component (e.g. hearing organ) would precede the evolution of its counterpart (e.g. sound-producing organ)
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