Joseph Hughes

ECOMORPHOLOGICAL ADAPTATION OF ACORN WEEVILS TO THEIR OVIPOSITION SITE

Abstract Comparisons between closely related species in different habitats provide a window into understanding how biotic factors shape evolutionary pathways. Weevils in the genus Curculio have radiated extensively across the Palearctic, where similar ecomorphs have evolved independently on different hosts. We examined ecological and morphological data for 31 Curculio species using multivariate statistics to determine which morphological traits covary and which correlate with the host seed size. A subset of 15 taxa for which phylogenetic relationships were known were used for comparative analyses and inferring historical patterns of trait evolution. The morphological analyses suggest rostrum size increased proportionately to body size in both males and females and that both rostrum and body size correlate with host seed size but that rostrum shape does not correlate with any of the seed traits used in the analyses. Host shifts from small seeds to considerably larger seeds or vice versa have occurred several times independently and historical trait evolution indicates that these host shifts were accompanied by morphological changes in rostrum size. These patterns suggest that seed size is an important selective agent for changes in rostrum length along with body size and thus may be a key factor promoting morphological differentiation in the genus Curculio.

Introduction: studying diversity in an era of ubiquitous genomics

Just as scientific discoveries enable the development of new technology, novel technologies can drive scientific progress. Similar to the adoption of PCR as a mainstream laboratory technique in the 1990s, the ability to readily sequence whole genomes today has opened up new areas of biology and fundamentally changed the way people work in existing fields. The most obvious feature of so-called ‘next generation’ sequencing (NGS) technologies (a misnomer that includes a wide array of platforms developed over the past decade) is the enormous increase in throughput of sequence data, resulting in an unprecedented reduction in cost. A single sequencing ‘run’ of a high-end platform can generate up to 5 billion reads and determine the sequence of 1500 billion bp of DNA – the equivalent of 500 human genomes – in 3 to 4 days. The US National Human Genome Research Institute has tracked the changing price of DNA sequencing they fund from about

Dense Taxonomic EST Sampling and Its Applications for Molecular Systematics of the Coleoptera (Beetles)

5000 per Mb to 5 cents per Mb over the last 15 years: a 100 000-fold drop (see Fig 1). At the time of writing (2015) the sequencing equipment market is dominated by Illumina, and a relative lack of competition and the maturity of the current technology has at least temporarily slowed the fall in price. However, the development of newer sequencing platforms is expected to soon spark another era of rapidly declining prices and rising throughput. This enormous technological progress has been a boon for many areas of biology, but the change in technology has also required researchers to change the