A phylogenetic study to assess the link between biome specialization and diversification in swallowtail butterflies.

ABSTRACT: The resource-use hypothesis, proposed by E.S. Vrba, states that habitat fragmentation caused by climatic oscillations would affect particularly biome specialists (species inhabiting only one biome), which might show higher speciation and extinction rates than biome generalists. If true, lineages would accumulate biome-specialist species. This effect would be particularly exacerbated for biomes located at the periphery of the global climatic conditions, namely, biomes that have high/low precipitation and high/low temperature such as rainforest (warm-humid), desert (warm-dry), steppe (cold-dry) and tundra (cold-humid). Here, we test these hypotheses in swallowtail butterflies, a clade with more than 570 species, covering all the continents but Antarctica, and all climatic conditions. Swallow

SUBMITTER: Gamboa S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9543414 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature