The Evolution of Endophagy in Herbivorous Insects.

ABSTRACT: Herbivorous feeding inside plant tissues, or endophagy, is a common lifestyle across Insecta, and occurs in insect taxa that bore, roll, tie, mine, gall, or otherwise modify plant tissues so that the tissues surround the insects while they are feeding. Some researchers have developed hypotheses to explain the adaptive significance of certain endophytic lifestyles (e.g., miners or gallers), but we are unaware of previous efforts to broadly characterize the adaptive significance of endophagy more generally. To fill this knowledge gap, we characterized the limited set of evolutionary selection pressures that could have encouraged phytophagous insects to feed inside plants, and then consider how these factors align with evidence for endophagy in the evolutionary history of orders of herbivorou

SUBMITTER: Tooker JF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7673406 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature