RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Niche filtering, not interspecific resource competition, explains the co-occurrence of butterfly species across the Japanese archipelago JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 132530 DO 10.1101/132530 A1 Ryosuke Nakadai A1 Koya Hashimoto A1 Takaya Iwasaki A1 Yasuhiro Sato YR 2017 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/30/132530.abstract AB The relevance of interspecific resource competition in the context of community assembly by herbivorous insects is a well-known topic in ecology. Most previous studies focused on local species assemblies, that shared host plants. Few studies evaluated species pairs within a single taxon when investigating the effects of host plant sharing at the regional scale. Herein, we explore the effect of plant sharing on the geographical co-occurrence patterns of 229 butterflies distributed across the Japanese archipelago; we use two spatial scales (10 × 10 km and 1 × 1 km grids) to this end. We considered that we might encounter one of two predictable patterns in terms of the relationship between co-occurrence and host-sharing among butterflies. On the one hand, host-sharing might promote distributional exclusivity attributable to interspecific resource competition. On the other hand, sharing of host plants might promote co-occurrence attributable to filtering by resource niche. At both grid scales, we found significant negative correlations between host use similarity and distributional exclusivity. Our results support the thesis that the butterfly co-occurrence pattern across the Japanese archipelago is better explained by filtering via resource niche rather than interspecific resource competition.