Abstract
Ecological interactions among plants, insect herbivores, and parasitoids are pervasive in nature and play important roles in community assembling, but the codiversification of tri-trophic interactions has received less attention. Here we compare pairwise codiversification patterns between a set of 22 fig species, their herbivorous pollinating and galling wasps, and their parasitoids. The parasitoid phylogeny showed significant congruence and more cospeciation events with host insects phylogeny than with host plants. These results suggest that parasitoid phylogeny and speciation is more closely related to their host insects than to their host plants. The pollinating wasps hosted more parasitoid species than gallers and indicated a more intense interspecific competition among parasitoids associated with pollinators. Closer matching and fewer evolutionary host shifts were found between parasitoids and galler hosts than between parasitoids and pollinator hosts. These results suggest that interspecific competition among parasitoids, rather than resource availability of host wasps, is the main driver of the codiversification pattern in this community. Therefore, our study highlights the important role of interspecific competition among high trophic level insects in plant-insect tri-trophic community assembling.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e4062 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Ecology |
| Volume | 104 |
| Issue number | 7 |
| Publication status | Published - Jul 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2023 The Authors. Ecology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of The Ecological Society of America.
Open Access - Access Right Statement
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. © 2023 The Authors.Keywords
- host switching
- interspecific competition
- fig parasitoid wasp
- fig
- tri-trophic community
- codiversification