Cutting the sap: First molecular phylogeny of twig‐girdler longhorn beetles (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae: Lamiinae: Onciderini) suggests shifts in host plant attack behaviours contributed to morphological evolution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Understanding how novel adaptive traits arise, evolve and impact other aspects of an organism's phenotype is a foundational question in evolutionary biology. We explore this by focusing on Onciderini (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae: Lamiinae), a tribe of longhorn beetles commonly referred to as twig girdlers because the females of some species girdle live trees to deposit their eggs. We reconstructed the first time‐calibrated phylogeny of the Onciderini, based on three genetic markers (cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 ‘ cox1’ , Wingless ‘ Wg ’ and carbamoyl‐phosphate synthase domain of the CAD locus ‘ CPS’ ), and used morphometric data, employing multiple models of trait evolution and phylogenetic regressions, to assess whether girdling behaviour predicts head size or head size sexual dimorphism. Our results indicate that onciderines originated c. 49 million years ago ‘Ma’ (95% highest posterior densities ‘HPD’: 44.1–54.57 Ma) and consist of two major lineages, which we formalize as subtribes Hypsiomatina and Onciderina. Additionally, our analyses revealed several taxonomic inconsistencies within the tribe, which we rectify by proposing new synonymies, including Jamesia Jekel as a synonym of Hypselomus Perty, Cipriscola Dillon & Dillon of Hypsioma Audinet‐Serville and Psyllotoxus Thomson and Taricanus Thomson as a synonym of Oncideres Lacordaire, and a new combination for Periergates kenjii Nearns & Swift as Oncideres kenjii (Nearns & Swift) comb. nov . Using this new phylogenetic framework, we identified five independent unidirectional origins of girdling behaviour within the tribe. Overall, our results suggest that girdling influences head size evolution in Onciderini, as it is associated with an increase in both male and female head size of girdler species. Despite this, girdling and non‐girdling lineages do not consistently differ in head size sexual dimorphism. This study refines the classification of Onciderini and marks a significant step in understanding the evolutionary dynamics shaping the diversity of twig‐girdler beetles, a group with notable ecological and economic importance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".