Evolution of diversity in metabolic strategies
Abstract
Understanding the origin and maintenance of biodiversity is a fundamental problem. Many theoretical approaches have been investigating ecological interactions, such as competition, as potential drivers of diversification. Classical consumer-resource models predict that the number of coexisting species should not exceed the number of distinct resources, a phenomenon known as the competitive exclusion principle. It has recently been argued that including physiological tradeoffs in consumer-resource models can lead to violations of this principle and to ecological coexistence of very high numbers of species. Here we show that these results crucially depend on the functional form of the tradeoff. We investigate the evolutionary dynamics of resource use constrained by tradeoffs and show that if the tradeoffs are non-linear, the system either does not diversify, or diversifies into a number of coexisting species that does not exceed the number of resources. In particular, very high diversity can only be observed for linear tradeoffs.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are obtained through the codes which have been deposited in https://github.com/jaros007/Codes_for_Evolution_of_diversity_in_metabolic_strategies
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Author details
Funding
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Wenying Shou, University College London, United Kingdom
Publication history
- Preprint posted: October 21, 2020 (view preprint)
- Received: February 22, 2021
- Accepted: August 5, 2021
- Accepted Manuscript published: August 5, 2021 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: September 9, 2021 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2021, Caetano et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Further reading
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- Ecology
- Evolutionary Biology
Most phytophagous insect species exhibit a limited diet breadth and specialize on a few or a single host plant. In contrast, some species display a remarkably large diet breadth, with host plants spanning several families and many species. It is unclear, however, whether this phylogenetic generalism is supported by a generic metabolic use of common host chemical compounds (‘metabolic generalism’) or alternatively by distinct uses of diet-specific compounds (‘multi-host metabolic specialism’)? Here, we simultaneously investigated the metabolomes of fruit diets and of individuals of a generalist phytophagous species, Drosophila suzukii, that developed on them. The direct comparison of metabolomes of diets and consumers enabled us to disentangle the metabolic fate of common and rarer dietary compounds. We showed that the consumption of biochemically dissimilar diets resulted in a canalized, generic response from generalist individuals, consistent with the metabolic generalism hypothesis. We also showed that many diet-specific metabolites, such as those related to the particular color, odor, or taste of diets, were not metabolized, and rather accumulated in consumer individuals, even when probably detrimental to fitness. As a result, while individuals were mostly similar across diets, the detection of their particular diet was straightforward. Our study thus supports the view that dietary generalism may emerge from a passive, opportunistic use of various resources, contrary to more widespread views of an active role of adaptation in this process. Such a passive stance towards dietary chemicals, probably costly in the short term, might favor the later evolution of new diet specializations.
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- Evolutionary Biology
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