Details of Award
NERC Reference : NE/C519538/1
Macroecology and macroevolution of incompletely known taxa: a case study involving tropical and temperate turnover and dispersal in parasitic wasps.
Grant Award
- Principal Investigator:
- Professor D Quicke, Imperial College London, Biology
- Co-Investigator:
- Professor A Purvis, The Natural History Museum, Life Sciences
- Grant held at:
- Imperial College London, Biology
- Science Area:
- Terrestrial
- Overall Classification:
- Terrestrial
- ENRIs:
- Biodiversity
- Science Topics:
- Population Genetics/Evolution
- Systematics & Taxonomy
- Behavioural Ecology
- Abstract:
- The great majority of the world's animal species are invertebrates and it is estimated that as few as 10% of these have been described to date. This contrasts with the mammals and birds which are to a first approximation, completely known. Being so well known, it has been possible to use mammals and birds to answer many large questions in ecology and evolution. Such questions include how their major distribution patterns have arisen, what factors make particular groups (lineages) more or less prone to extinction, and whether all descendents of a given ancestral species are likely to give rise to equally large numbers of species through evolutionary time. However, mammals and birds ace likely to be atypical of animals as a whole for any number of reasons; both are warm-blooded for example. Therefore it is desirable to be able to address such questions in groups that are far less well known, such as the vast majority of insects. This requires development and testing of new techniques because existing ones assume that virtually all species are known (or can be counted) and that the evolutionary relationships between them are completely and reasonably accurately known. Here we will develop and test techniques that will allow large (macroevolutionary and macroecological) questions to be answered for relatively far more poorly known groups of organisms and we will apply these to one of the largest superfamilies of insects, the Ichneumonoidea. These are parasitic wasps that, despite being generally unfamiliar to most people, are both hyperdiverse and of great ecological importance in that they are responsible for regulating the populations of most other insects, and indeed they are frequently employed in biological control programmes to keep pest insect population sizes to within economic thresholds. No one knows how many species of them there may really be but the answer is probably near to one million. Ichneumon wasps have also been the focus of a great deal of ecological theory, and one particular aspect that has attracted attention is that one group of them apparently does not display the typical large increase in species richness towards the tropics that most other groups do. In addition they can be clearly divided into two groups based on life history strategy, one being composed largely of host specialists, the other more generalist species. Thus we are interested in determining how these may be related and whether the life history strategies are differently distributed with latitude and that this might explain their anomalous diversity pattern We will therefore test whether the rates at which groups with these life histories undergo speciation and extinction (collectively turnover) at equal rates. Finally we will test the prediction that generalists are more easily able to colonise new regions because they are more likely to be able to locate a suitable host there, and we will relate this to global continental movements during and since the Cretaceous period.
- NERC Reference:
- NE/C519538/1
- Grant Stage:
- Completed
- Scheme:
- Standard Grants Pre FEC
- Grant Status:
- Closed
- Programme:
- Standard Grant
This grant award has a total value of £283,286
FDAB - Financial Details (Award breakdown by headings)
| Total - Staff | Total - T&S | Total - Other Costs | Total - Equipment | Total - Indirect Costs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £166,917 | £6,335 | £29,150 | £4,101 | £76,782 |
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