TY - JOUR
T1 - Explosive adaptive radiation and extreme phenotypic diversity within ant-nest beetles
AU - Moore, Wendy
AU - Robertson, James A.
N1 - Funding Information: It is with great pleasure that we recognize the support of the following people who have enhanced the value of this work. Mostly we would like to thank our collaborators in paussidology for thoughtful discussions through the years, including Drs. Peter Nagel, Andrea Di Giulio, and Emanuela Maurizi. Special thanks to all the collectors who preserved specimens for molecular work and made them available for this study, especially Killyiana Angelus, Chuck Bellamy, Richard C. Brusca, Caroline Chaboo, Andrea Di Giulio, Markus Erle, Terry Erwin, Brian Fisher, Eric Fisher, Kim Franklin, José Galian, François Génier, Harold Greeney, Charles Griswold, Rasolondalao Harin’Hala Hasinjaka, Mike Irwin, Mike Ivie, David H. Kavanaugh, Gino Nearns, David Maddison, Munetoshi Maruyama, Joseph McHugh, Kelly Miller, Scott Miller, Geoff Monteith, Kevin Moulton, Hamish Robertson, Clarke Scholtz, Allesh Sinu, Peter Webb, and Kipling Will. We also thank Andrea Di Giulio for providing illustrations of the antennae in Figure 1 and Alex Wild for permission to use his ant photos in Figures 2 and S3 . Joseph Brown and Corrie Moreau provided advice with analyses. Richard C. Brusca and three anonymous reviewers provided thoughtful comments that improved this manuscript. This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation (grants DEB-0309221 to W.M. and David Maddison, DEB-0908187 to W.M., and DEB-1256976 to W.M. and J.A.R.). Publisher Copyright: © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
PY - 2014/10/20
Y1 - 2014/10/20
N2 - Ant-nest beetles (Paussus) are the quintessential Trojan horses of the insect world. They hack the complex communication system of ants, allowing them to blend into the ant society and be treated as royalty, all the while preying upon the ants and the ants' brood and duping the ants into rearing their young [1-3]. Here we present results of the first molecular- based phylogeny of ant-nest beetles, which reveals that this symbiosis has produced one of the most stunning examples of rapid adaptive radiation documented to date. The most recent ancestor of a Paussus clade endemic to Madagascar is only 2.6 million years old. This species gave rise to a remarkably phenotypically diverse clade of 86 extant species with a net diversification interval of 0.38-0.81 million years, a rate of radiation faster than classic textbook examples of large, recent, rapid radiations such as Anolis lizards on Caribbean islands, cichlids of the East African Great Lakes, finches on the Galápagos Islands, and Drosophila and tetragnathid spiders on the Hawaiian Islands [4-8]. In order for Paussus to adapt to a new host ant species, the beetle's ability to perceive, deceive, and communicate with the new host must evolve quickly and in synchrony in both the larval and adult life stages, resulting in unusually strong selective pressure levied by their host ants. Data on host associations suggest that the history of host shifts may help explain both the striking phenotypic diversity within the Malagasy radiation and the evolution of phenotypically similar yet distantly related species in Madagascar and Africa.
AB - Ant-nest beetles (Paussus) are the quintessential Trojan horses of the insect world. They hack the complex communication system of ants, allowing them to blend into the ant society and be treated as royalty, all the while preying upon the ants and the ants' brood and duping the ants into rearing their young [1-3]. Here we present results of the first molecular- based phylogeny of ant-nest beetles, which reveals that this symbiosis has produced one of the most stunning examples of rapid adaptive radiation documented to date. The most recent ancestor of a Paussus clade endemic to Madagascar is only 2.6 million years old. This species gave rise to a remarkably phenotypically diverse clade of 86 extant species with a net diversification interval of 0.38-0.81 million years, a rate of radiation faster than classic textbook examples of large, recent, rapid radiations such as Anolis lizards on Caribbean islands, cichlids of the East African Great Lakes, finches on the Galápagos Islands, and Drosophila and tetragnathid spiders on the Hawaiian Islands [4-8]. In order for Paussus to adapt to a new host ant species, the beetle's ability to perceive, deceive, and communicate with the new host must evolve quickly and in synchrony in both the larval and adult life stages, resulting in unusually strong selective pressure levied by their host ants. Data on host associations suggest that the history of host shifts may help explain both the striking phenotypic diversity within the Malagasy radiation and the evolution of phenotypically similar yet distantly related species in Madagascar and Africa.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cub.2014.09.022
DO - 10.1016/j.cub.2014.09.022
M3 - Article
C2 - 25283783
SN - 0960-9822
VL - 24
SP - 2435
EP - 2439
JO - Current Biology
JF - Current Biology
IS - 20
ER -