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ViewAttendees 7

10-Minute Paper

Systematics, Evolution, and Biodiversity

SysEB: Biogeography

Evolutionary lag times associated with events of geographic range expansions or shifts between bee hosts and cleptoparasites

Wednesday, November 8, 2023
10:00 AM – 10:12 AM ET
Location: Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, Chesapeake J-K
In-Person
Cleptoparasitic bees rely entirely on their hosts to feed their brood, never collecting pollen. Additionally, some cleptoparasitic lineages specialized in attacking nests of females that also add floral lipids to larval food. In Neotropical region, Centris and Epicharis bees ancestrally explored the oil flowers of Malpighiaceae plant family in humid forests, but further colonized other biomes, such as semi-desertic environments, also expanding their floral breath. Their nests are attacked by the specialized Ericrocidine cleptoparasites, thus arising questions on how those parasites track the geographic range expansion or shifts of their hosts. Our hypothesis posits an evolutionary lag between the range shifts of hosts and cleptoparasites, with hosts expansion consistently preceding the appearance of parasites. To investigate this, we reconstruct biogeographical history of both parasites and hosts under a phylogenetic framework, while also accounting for uncertainties in divergence time estimation. Our findings confirm that, for the majority of lineages, hosts colonization of new areas precedes the parasites occurrence, aligning with the broader notion of dependence of parasites on their hosts. Nevertheless, for some lineages, we observed the opposite pattern, where parasites precede the occurrence of hosts in a new area. Since there are no documented instances of a reversal to pollen collection in bees, the chances of parasites survival without their hosts are minimal. However, it is noteworthy that evolutionary shifts from oil-hosts to other bee hosts occur more frequently, thereby reinforcing the notion of plasticity in host selection among these cleptoparasitic bees