Is ecological speciation a major trend in aphids? Insights from a molecular phylogeny of the conifer-feeding genus Cinara
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: In the past decade ecological speciation has been recognized as having an important role in the diversification of plant-feeding insects. Aphids are host-specialised phytophagous insects that mate on their host plants and, as such, they are prone to experience reproductive isolation linked with host plant association that could ultimately lead to species formation. The generality of such a scenario remains to be tested through macroevolutionary studies. To explore the prevalence of host-driven speciation in the diversification of the aphid genus Cinara and to investigate alternative modes of speciation, we reconstructed a phylogeny of this genus based on mitochondrial, nuclear and Buchnera aphidicola DNA sequence fragments and applied a DNA-based method of species delimitation. Using a recent software (PhyloType), we explored evolutionary transitions in host-plant genera, feeding sites and geographic distributions in the diversification of Cinara and investigated how transitions in these characters have accompanied speciation events. RESULTS: The diversification of Cinara has been constrained by host fidelity to conifer genera sometimes followed by sequential colonization onto different host species and by feeding-site specialisation. Nevertheless, our analyses suggest that, at the most, only half of the speciation events were accompanied by ecological niche shifts. The contribution of geographical isolation in the speciation process is clearly apparent in the occurrence of species from two continents in the same clades in relatively terminal positions in our phylogeny. Furthermore, in agreement with predictions from scenarios in which geographic isolation accounts for speciation events, geographic overlap between species increased significantly with time elapsed since their separation. CONCLUSIONS: The history of Cinara offers a different perspective on the mode of speciation of aphids than that provided by classic models such as the pea aphid. In this genus of aphids, the role of climate and landscape history has probably been as important as host-plant specialisation in having shaped present-day diversity.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it