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Niche explosion

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Abstract

The following syndrome of features occurs in several groups of phytophagous insects: (1) wingless females, (2) dispersal by larvae, (3) woody hosts, (4) extreme polyphagy, (5) high abundance, resulting in status as economic pests, (6) invasiveness, and (7) obligate parthenogenesis in some populations. If extreme polyphagy is defined as feeding on 20 or more families of hostplants, this syndrome is found convergently in several species of bagworm moths, tussock moths, root weevils, and 5 families of scale insects. We hypothesize that extreme polyphagy in these taxa results from “niche explosion”, a positive feedback loop connecting large population size to broad host range. The niche explosion has a demographic component (sometimes called the “amplification effect” in studies of pathogens) as well as a population-genetic component, due mainly to the increased effectiveness of natural selection in larger populations. The frequent origins of parthenogenesis in extreme polyphages are, in our interpretation, a consequence of this increased effectiveness of natural selection and consequent reduced importance of sexuality. The niche explosion hypothesis makes detailed predictions about the comparative genomics and population genetics of extreme polyphages and related specialists. It has a number of potentially important implications, including an explanation for the lack of observed trade-offs between generalists and specialists, a re-interpretation of the ecological correlates of parthenogenesis, and a general expectation that Malthusian population explosions may be amplified by Darwinian effects.

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Acknowledgments

We dedicate this paper to Richard G. Harrison, who served as the ideal graduate advisor to BBN. Thanks to Richard Cowles for inviting BBN to talk about weevil evolution at the Biology and Management of Root Weevils symposium at the 2005 Entomological Society of America meeting, a talk that ultimately led to the writing of this paper. The paper was also crucially informed by studies of host use in armored scale insects, conducted by Jeremy Andersen, Rodger Gwiazdowski, and Jin Wu, and funded by the National Science Foundation (DEB-0447880). Thanks to Michael Lynch, Roger Blackman, Victor Eastop, May Berenbaum, Jan Engelstädter, Douglas Futuyma, Michael Whitlock, Ary Hoffman, and Sally Otto for discussion and encouragement. Thanks to Adrian Hine for help with HOSTS database queries. Thanks to Dan Howard and two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft of manuscript.

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  1. Department of Plant, Soil and Insect Science and Graduate Program in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, 01003, USA

    Benjamin B. Normark & Norman A. Johnson

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  1. Benjamin B. Normark
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Normark, B.B., Johnson, N.A. Niche explosion. Genetica 139, 551–564 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10709-010-9513-5

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