Rarity of blister beetles (Coleoptera: Meloidae) in Southern Africa correlates with their phylogeny and trophic habits, but not body size.
2014. European Journal of Entomology 111(4): 529-535.
Blog Author: Willow Nguy
Authors:a beetle-loving power team of Bologna students!
Monica Pitzalis
PhD from Roma Tre University
Ministry of Education University and Research (Italy)
Phylogenetic/ biogeographic reconstructions, community ecology of Coleoptera, applying zoology to environmental management
Valentina Amore
PhD from Tuscia University, Postdoc at Complutense Uiversity of Madrid
Currently working on MS in education at Sapienza University of Rome
Ecology, Evolutionary Biology. And Entomology, now education
Francesca Montalto
Studied under Bologna at Roma Tre
Luca Luiselli
Full Professor at Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Research Director at IDECC
Tropical community ecology of snakes and chelonians
Marco A. Bologna
Full Professor at Roma Tre University
Systematics, biology, and taxonomy of Coleoptera. Community ecology and conservation of herps and beetles in different Mediterranean environments.
Main Question
Is abundance correlated with body size in Namibian blister beetles?
Are rare species of blister beetles more likely to be phylogenetically primitive?
Are beetles in more specialized feeding guilds more rare than those in generalized guilds?
Methods
Collected blister beetles from all over Namibia (891 beetles from 76 species)
sampling time ~20 days a year for 5 years during rainy season
Beetles and their host plants were identified and sorted into feeding guilds
Used an updated Meloidae phylogeny from Bologna and gave each beetle a “phylogenetic score” from basal to derived
Range of body sizes determined from museum collections
Results
Abundance patterns were strongly uneven with 10/76 species accounting for >50% of individuals
80.3% of species were in nonspecialized feeding guilds
More basal species were less abundant than more derived species
Body size was not correlated with abundance
Conclusions
Is abundance correlated with body size in Namibian blister beetles?
No, large species were not rarer in their samples
Are rare species of blister beetles more likely to be phylogenetically primitive?
Yes, but dispersal abilities should be looked at with singletons too
Are beetles in more specialized feeding guilds more rare than those in generalized guilds?
Yes, specialized feeders are more rare than non-specialized (but it might be a sampling bias)
Anything else?
Only a few species are common and those common species dominate abundances
Trophic guild and phylogeny patterns were significant, but not deterministic of species relative abundance
Questions
I would have liked to read more discussion about the basal vs derived traits in the beetles, but understand they didn’t want to scoop their advisor’s unpublished data. I’m not sure how meaningful the phylogenetic data is since they simplified them all into tribes with the biggest tribe obviously having the most individuals.
This paper was pretty straightforward, easy to read, and interesting to see the findings. However, a phylogenetic score is a little bit of confusion for me. It says "for each taxon, which increased in value from the base to the tips of the branches". I wonder if they have counted each common ancestors among each clade. "Ancestral species were less abundant than the recent taxons" is a cool pattern they found. Also, I am not sure why she has been repeatedly calling a certain taxon group as the primitive taxa. An evolutionary perspective, there is no such a taxon group is primitive. They could have primitive characters or traits but not themselves. All the species we are seen today (extant group) are at their best. None of them are primitive. I could not find the phylogenetic tree anywhere in this paper that we can see what does she meant from the actual tree.
ReplyDeleteI really liked Altangerel's point that the primitive traits may be shared with an ancestor but does not necessarily mean they are a primitive species themselves. I would also be interested to learn more about how they scored them in a phylogenetic source.
ReplyDeleteInteresting that both papers chose beetles to sample, is there a reason? Easier to find? Cool that they were able to sample from five different biomes in one modest-sized country.
ReplyDeleteI like that the authors didn't infer anything dramatic from their results. Their discussion was short and sweet, and they didn't expand their findings to universal conclusions. Their paper was straightforward and easy to follow, which was nice as well.
ReplyDeleteBlister beetles sound really interesting and I would like to learn more about them.
I think it's interesting that the authors claim there's no widely accepted definition of rarity, given the rarity paper we read previously in class. While this may not be "widely accepted", it would have been interesting to know if the authors knew of that method. It also would have been interesting to see the authors make their own rarity index to better understand their results. If there's not a widely accepted method, why not make one for your field?
ReplyDeleteI agree with Auggie about his comment on the use of the term primitive in the paper. Also, I don't know much about insect collection methods, but it seems to me that the way the data was gathered would preclude robust population abundance comparisons. This is because I imagine that with manual capture, the size and color of the beetle will have an important effect on its detection and capture probability, resulting in biased abundance dataset. Maybe abundance estimates corrected by detection probability could have helped.
ReplyDeleteI find it pretty interesting that the pattern of very few species dominated the samples and most other species are way less abundant. I didn't know that this is a common pattern in the tropic, because the authors said this applied for snakes, amphibians, bugs and arthropods. Most papers we have read so far that involve rarity have to keep stating that there is no widely accepted definition of rarity. I agree with Devra that there should just be a clear definition.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with Auggie's comment. I also liked how easy to read and clear this paper was. And I also think they should have included at least the citation of the philogeny they used to call them primitive.
ReplyDeleteI loving these easy to read articles.... Definitely makes learning about macroecology so much more enjoyable when I kinda understand what’s going on :). Hey Ben, I don’t know much about beetles, but I have a professor who loves beetles and he was telling me that some bugs can be found literally wherever you go and you can find them in abundance and I believe beetles are one of those bugs. Of course in this study they were trying to determine the correlation between abundance and body size, but I’ve noticed I’ve never gone somewhere and not seen a beetle.
ReplyDelete