Are Fabaceae the principal super-hosts of galls in Brazil?

Abstract

We surveyed 58 scientific articles published between 1987 and 2018 to evaluate the representative nature of the Fabaceae as hosts of insect galls in Brazil, and to gain a better understanding of the interactions between gall-inducing insects and plants and the evolutionary ecology of those insects and their plant hosts. A total of 438 gall morphotypes were reported as being generated by gall-inducing insects on 178 Fabaceae host species belonging to five subfamilies Caesalpinioideae (22 genera and 79 spp.), Cercidoideae (1 genus and 11 spp.), Detarioideae (6 genera and 17 spp.), Dialioideae (2 genera and 2 spp.), and Papilionoideae (26 genera and 69 spp.). The plant host genera demonstrating the greatest richness of gall-inducing insects were Inga, Bauhinia, and Copaifera; the super-host species were Copaifera langsdorffii, Bauhinia brevipes, and Copaifera sabulicola. Most of the galls were observed on leaves; they were mostly globoid, green, glabrous, isolated, and unilocular. The principal gall inducers belonged to Cecidomyiidae; the associated fauna was represented by Collembola, Coleoptera, Diptera, Formicidae, Hemiptera, Hymenoptera, Lepidoptera, Pseudoscorpionida, and Thysanoptera. Fabaceae are the principal super-hosts of galls and one of the most diverse families of angiosperms in Brazil, aggregating evidences for the hypotheses of floristic richness and taxon size.

Diversity of insect galls from Mato Grosso State, Brazil: North Pantanal

“…Fabaceae and Myrtaceae are two of the richest plant families in Pantanal (Pott et al 2011). Pattern recovered in our study corroborating the hypothesis that families with the highest number of plant species also have the highest number of gall-forming species associated with them in all Brazilian biomes (Araújo et al 2019, Santos-Silva & Araújo 2020). Sapindaceae appears as the third richest family, because of Serjania Mill.…”

Diversity of insect galls from Mato Grosso State, Brazil: Cerrado

“…Fabaceae, Bignoniaceae, Melastomataceae, Myrtaceae, Burseraceae, Malpighiaceae, and Vochysiaceae are the richer families in species in the Parque Nacional da Chapada dos Guimarães, which corroborates in part the hypothesis of the predominance of gall morphotypes in the families with the most remarkable species richness (Southwood 1960, 1961, Santos-Silva & Araújo 2020. Also confirm the predominance of these families in the data compiled by Cintra et al (2020).…”

Galling: the prevalent form of insect folivory in the latest Neogene monsoon-influenced tropical forests of the Chotanagpur Plateau, eastern India

“…Our results also support the plant family size hypothesis, which states that the diversity of galling insects should be greater among the host plant families with the highest numbers of species (Araújo et al, 2011(Araújo et al, , 2019Santos-Silva and Araujo, 2020). A high number of species within a family creates a greater availability of niches available for galling (Mendonça, 2007).…”