A phylogenetic study to assess the link between biome specialization and diversification in swallowtail butterflies
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Date
2022-10
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Abstract
The resource-use hypothesis, proposed by E.S. Vrba, states that habitat fragmenta-tion caused by climatic oscillations would affect particularly biome specialists (speciesinhabiting only one biome), which might show higher speciation and extinction ratesthan biome generalists. If true, lineages would accumulate biome-specialist species.This effect would be particularly exacerbated for biomes located at the periphery ofthe global climatic conditions, namely, biomes that have high/low precipitation andhigh/low temperature such as rainforest (warm-humid), desert (warm-dry), steppe(cold-dry) and tundra (cold-humid). Here, we test these hypotheses in swallowtail but-terflies, a clade with more than 570 species, covering all the continents but Antarctica,and all climatic conditions. Swallowtail butterflies are among the most studied insects,and they are a model group for evolutionary biology and ecology studies. Continentalmacroecological rules are normally tested using vertebrates, this means that there arefewer examples exploring terrestrial invertebrate patterns at global scale. Here, wecompiled a large Geographic Information System database on swallowtail butterflies'distribution maps and used the most complete time-calibrated phylogeny to quantifydiversification rates (DRs). In this paper, we aim to answer the following questions: (1)Are there more biome-specialist swallowtail butterflies than biome generalists? (2)Is DR related to biome specialization? (3) If so, do swallowtail butterflies inhabitingextreme biomes show higher DRs? (4) What is the effect of species distribution area?Our results showed that swallowtail family presents a great number of biome special-ists which showed substantially higher DRs compared to generalists. We also foundthat biome specialists are unevenly distributed across biomes. Overall, our results areconsistent with the resource-use hypothesis, species climatic niche and biome frag-mentation as key factors promoting isolation.
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bioclimatology, ecological specialization, macroecology, macroevolution, Papilionidae, resource-use, speciation
Citation
Gamboa, S., Condamine, F. L., Cantalapiedra, J. L., Varela, S., Pelegrín, J. S., Menéndez, I., Blanco, F., & Hernández Fernández, M. (2022). A phylogenetic study to assess the link between biome specialization and diversification in swallowtail butterflies. Global Change Biology, 28(20), 5901–5913. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16344