en Español      print

Case study: why so many beetles?

If you were to randomly pick an extant animal species, odds are that it would be a beetle. While there are 250,000 described species of plants, 12,000 described species of roundworms, and only 4,000 described species of mammals, there are over 350,000 beetle species described, with many more beetles yet to be discovered!

What accounts for all these beetles? Brian Farrell (1998) performed a phylogenetic study that helps to answer that question. He reconstructed the phylogeny of all the major groups of beetles and noted their feeding characteristics. This research allowed him to infer what the ancestral beetles were likely to have been eating and when each lineage switched to a new type of food. His evidence suggests that different beetle lineages switched to feeding on flowering plants (angiosperms) several times during their evolutionary history.

To understand what happened when these switches occurred, Farrell compared sister taxa, clades that are each other's closest relatives. He saw the same pattern again and again (as shown by the representation below): the lineage that switched to angiosperms speciated frequently and became very diverse, while the lineage that did not switch to angiosperms had a lower rate of speciation and did not become very diverse. Feeding on angiosperms is associated with higher rates of speciation (or lower rates of extinction — it's hard to tell). What makes this link between food and diversity particularly compelling is that it played out several times in beetle evolution — nature replicated the same experiment over and over again.