TY - JOUR T1 - Interactions retain the co-phylogenetic matching that communities lost JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/033050 SP - 033050 AU - Timothée Poisot AU - Daniel B. Stouffer Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/24/033050.abstract N2 - Both species and their interactions are affected by changes that occur at evolutionary time-scales, and shape both ecological communities and their phylogenetic structure. But because extent ecological community structure is contingent upon random chance, environmental filters, and local effects, it is unclear how much ecological signal local communities should retain. Here we show that, in a host-parasite system where species interactions vary substantially over a continental gradient, the ecological significance of individual interactions is maintained across different scales. Notably, this occurs despite the fact that observed community variation at the local scale frequently tends to weaken or remove community-wide phylogenetic signal. When considered in terms of the interplay between community ecology and coevolutionary theory, our results demonstrate that individual interactions are capable and indeed likely to show a consistent signature of past evolutionary history even when woven into communities that do not. ER -