The Relationship Between Category Richness and Morphological Diversity in Jewel Beetles

Abstract

Correlation between the category richness (CR) and morphological diversity (MD) of some communities at a local scale was found pendent, however, examination of a whole category using a large dataset are lacking. In this study, 1119 jewel species from around the world representing all existing subfamilies and 33.78% of Buprestidae genera were selected as a test group. A geometric morphometric analysis on the contour of homologous traits: pronotum and elytra was conducted to quantify morphological diversity. Correlations between MD and CR among subfamilies were found to be consistently positive with the exceptions of a pronotum genus-level test on the subfamily category. The correlation was also found to be higher at the genus-level than it on the species-level, in both pronotum and elytron measurements. Based on our analyses the hypothesis of positive correlations was expected in the genus-level test of jewel beetles but rejected in species-level test. The inconsistent correlation between morphological diversity and species richness revealed convergent morphological variation of pronotum under the similar functional diversity in Buprestidae. In addition, our test revealed variable correlation between MD and CR based on different groups and characters, which might be caused by morphological changes under coevolution with different ecological factors.

The Modeling and Forecasting of Carabid Beetle Distribution in Northwestern China

“…Carabid beetles live in moist habitats and are excellent model species on research of ecological and conservation theory [ 64 , 65 , 66 ]. The 3rd International Carabidologists’ Meeting emphasized that it is needed to concern on the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation on dynamics of beetle population if wise decisions are to be made regarding conservation and land-use [ 67 ].…”