CAREER: Teaching Modern Biodiversity Science from Fieldwork to Phylogeny: Diversity, Systematics, & Evolution of Ecologically Promiscuous Aquatic Beetles

University Of Kansas Center For Research Inc, Lawrence KS

Investigators

Abstract

Animals living in freshwater and terrestrial habitats are presented with dramatically different physiological and morphological challenges, including how they breathe, move, feed, and reproduce. While animals, particularly insects, have shifted between these habitat extremes many times over their evolutionary history, little is known of how these major aquatic-terrestrial transitions occur or how they affect the diversity and distribution of species. This research will focus on an insect group that contains species with a wide range of habitats from open waters to terrestrial leaf litter. By reconstructing the evolutionary history of this lineage, the researchers will examine when, where, and how it has evolved across the aquatic-terrestrial boundary, and use the group as a model to understand how other organisms may have undergone major habitat shifts. Understanding how insects undergo major ecological transitions and what implications these transitions have can improve our understanding of how animals respond to changing climates and altered environments. The broader impacts of this research include the training of two PhD students in the biodiversity sciences. A new undergraduate course in biodiversity monitoring and assessment will be developed to teach the theory, methods, and practice of measuring species richness and turnover over geographic distances. This course will include fieldwork in Suriname and Guyana in conjunction with host country institutions. This research will use water scavenger beetles (Coleoptera: Hydrophilidae), a lineage that encompasses many independent transitions between aquatic and terrestrial niches, as a model to examine habitat shifts at multiple evolutionary scales: clades, species, and populations. Researchers will (1) infer a 500-species molecular phylogeny to identify the number, timing, and placement of habitat shifts and test for associated changes in diversification rate between habitat types, (2) examine the fine-scale morphological evolution associated with changing habitats through a species-level taxonomic revision of the Chasmogenus-group, including the description of approximately 50 new species, coupled with a morphological-molecular phylogeny, and (3) disentangle habitat-associated from lineage-specific effects on co-distributed populations by using RAD-seq methods to examine the genetic structure of 12 species with diverse ecological niches across three independent clades. Taken together, these approaches will provide new insights into how aquatic-terrestrial shifts have altered past evolutionary trajectories from the recent to hundreds of millions of years before present, and inform how organisms may respond to changing habitats in the future.