In: Ecology, 2009, vol. 90, no. 6, p. 1470-1477
Food webs depict who eats whom in communities. Ecologists have examined statistical metrics and other properties of food webs, but mainly due to the uneven quality of the data, the results have proved controversial. The qualitative data on which those efforts rested treat trophic interactions as present or absent and disregard potentially huge variation in their magnitude, an approach similar to...
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In: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2007, vol. 275, no. 1637, p. 879-885
Adaptation to different hosts plays a central role in the evolution of specialization and speciation in phytophagous insects and parasites, and our ability to experimentally rank hosts by their quality is critical to research to understand these processes. Here we provide a counter-intuitive example in which growth is faster on poor quality hosts. The leaf beetles Oreina elongata and...
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In: Molecular Ecology, 2007, vol. 16, no. 11, p. 2333-2343
The challenge in defining conservation units so that they represent evolutionary entities has been to combine both genetic properties and ecological significance. Here we make use of the complexity of the European Alps, with their genetic landscape shaped by geographical barriers and postglacial colonization, to examine the correlation between ecological and genetic divergence. Montane species,...
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In: Oikos, 2007, vol. 116, no. 1, p. 1514-1523
Herbivorous insects and phytopathogenic fungi often share their host plants. This creates a network of direct and indirect interactions, with far-reaching consequences for the ecology and evolution of all three parties. In the Alps, the leaf beetles Oreina elongata and Oreina cacaliae (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae), and the rust fungus Uromyces cacaliae (Uredinales:...
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In: Journal of Chemical Ecology, 2007, vol. 33, no. 11, p. 2011-2024
Chemical defense plays a central role for many herbivorous insects in their interactions with predators and host plants. The leaf beetle genus Oreina (Coleoptera, Chrysomelidae) includes species able to both sequester pyrrolizidine alkaloids and autogenously produce cardenolides. Sequestered compounds are clearly related to patterns of host-plant use, but variation in de novo...
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In: Proceedings of the Royal Society, 2001, vol. 268, no. 1478, p. 1849-1854
Understanding the fate of hybrids in wild populations is fundamental to understanding speciation. Here we provide evidence for disruptive sexual selection against hybrids between Heliconius cydno and Heliconius melpomene. The two species are sympatric across most of Central and Andean South America, and coexist despite a low level of hybridization. No-choice mating experiments show...
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In: Nature, 2001, vol. 411, p. 302-305
Speciation is facilitated if ecological adaptation directly causes assortative mating, but few natural examples are known. Here we show that a shift in colour pattern mimicry was crucial in the origin of two butterfly species. The sister species Heliconius melpomene and Heliconius cydno recently diverged to mimic different model taxa, and our experiments show that their mimetic...
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In: Evolution & Development, 2003, vol. 5, no. 3, p. 269-280
Despite renewed interest in the role of natural selection as a catalyst for the origin of species, the developmental and genetic basis of speciation remains poorly understood. Here we describe the genetics of Müllerian mimicry in Heliconius cydno and H. melpomene (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae), sister species that recently diverged to mimic other Heliconius. This mimetic shift...
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In: Evolution, 2001, vol. 55, no. 8, p. 1631–1638
Recent studies, primarily in Drosophila, have greatly advanced our understanding of Haldane's rule, the tendency for hybrid sterility or inviability to affect primarily the heterogametic sex (Haldane 1922). Although dominance theory (Turelli and Orr 1995) has been proposed as a general explanation of Haldane's rule, this remains to be tested in female-heterogametic taxa, such as the...
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In: Ecological Entomology, 2007, vol. 32, no. 1, p. 62-69
1. Choosing the plant on which to lay their eggs is the last act of care that most female herbivorous insects bestow upon their offspring. These decisions play a pivotal role in insect–plant interactions, placing host preference under strong selection and contributing to the diversity of phytophagous insects as one of the first traits to adapt to new hosts. 2. This study presents a test of...
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