Cophylogeny of the Ficus microcosm

Abstract

The various mutualistic and antagonistic symbioses between fig trees (Ficus: Moraceae) and chalcid wasps comprise a community in microcosm. Phylogenetic estimates of figs and fig wasps show general topological correspondence, making the microcosm a model system for cophylogeny. Incongruence between phylogenies from associated organisms can be reconciled through a combination of evolutionary events. Cophylogeny mapping reconciles phylogenies by embedding an associate tree into a host tree, finding the optimal combinations of events capable of explaining incongruence and evaluating the level of codivergence. This review addresses the results of cophylogeny analysis concerning Ficus and discusses the plausibility of different evolutionary events. Five different associations encompassing fig-pollinator, fig-parasite and pollinator-parasitoid interactions are reconciled. The method improves on previous comparisons by employing 'jungles' to provide an exhaustive and quantitative analysis of cophylogeny. A jungle is a mechanism for inferring host switches and obtaining all potentially optimal solutions to the reconciliation problem. The results support the consensus that figs codiverge significantly with pollinators but not non-pollinators. However, pollinators still appear to have switched between hosts in contradiction to the traditional model of faithful codivergence. This emphasises the growing realisation that evolutionary transitions in the microcosm are more flexible than previously thought and host specificity is necessary but not sufficient for codivergence. The importance of sampling strategy is emphasised by the influence of taxon set on the fig-pollinator and fig-parasite jungles. Spurious significant results for fig-parasite and fig-parasitoid jungles indicate that the choice of congruence measure influences significance; the total number of events required to reconcile two trees ('total cost') is not a good measure of congruence when switches cannot be realistically weighted.

Dangerously few liaisons: a review of mate‐finding Allee effects

“…Many sparse plant species have succeeded in avoiding both pollen limitation and inbreeding, by evolving highly specific mutualisms between one plant species and one species of pollinator (often insects, but also bats: Sakai 2002;Jackson 2004;Maia and Schlindwein 2006;Muchhala 2006).…”

Molecular phylogenies of figs and fig-pollinating wasps in the Ryukyu and Bonin (Ogasawara) islands, Japan

“…Recent advances in molecular phylogenetics afford us the opportunity to trace the co-evolutionary histories of figs and fig-wasps and to elucidate evolutionary trends of specific traits that contribute to the mutualism (e.g., Yokoyama, 1995Yokoyama, , 2003Herre et al, 1996;Machado et al, 1996Machado et al, , 2001Machado et al, , 2005Kerdelhue et al, 1999;Weiblen, 2000Weiblen, , 2001Weiblen, , 2004Weiblen and Bush, 2002;Cook and Rasplus, 2003;Jousselin et al, 2003;Datwyler and Weiblen, 2004;Jackson, 2004;Rønsted et al, 2005;Su et al, 2008). These studies reveal a broad scale pattern of co-speciation, but at a finer scale within clades of closely related species there is little support for strict sense co-speciation (e.g., Weiblen and Bush, 2002;Machado et al, 2005;Su et al, 2008).…”

A time and space complexity reduction for coevolutionary analysis of trees generated under both a Yule and Uniform model

“…This set includes evolutionary data from a number of fields including but not limited to, pathogens and their hosts (Charleston and Robertson, 2002), plant-insect relationships (McLeish et al, 2007), the evolutionary dependencies between plants and fungi (Refrégier et al, 2008), parasitic (Page et al, 2004) and mutualistic (Jackson, 2004) coevolution, and biogeography (Badets et al, 2011). The aim of this data set is to ensure that the running time improvements offered by the newly proposed data structure are consistent across the full spectrum of coevolutionary instances.…”