BoCP-Implementation: US-China: Trait innovations in the fig mutualism and their contributions to increased patterns of biodiversity

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Interacting species that depend on each other for their survival and reproduction, like plants and their pollinators, have played major roles in the diversification of life on Earth. A broad goal of this project is to understand how those interacting species change and are being affected by the changing climate. The researchers will study one of the most ecologically important and highly diverse group of interacting species: figs, the small wasps that pollinate them, and the diverse group of parasitic wasps that depend on figs for survival but that in most cases do not provide benefits to them. They will study how species interactions and adaptation to local conditions change geographically, how those changes are influenced by different reproductive characteristics of the figs, and how a group of novel and diverse morphological and physiological wasp attributes that are necessary for the interaction with figs have evolved. This research will have educational impacts in K-12 student and teacher training via collaboration with public school teachers from local minority-serving high schools. Moreover, the project will have important implications for agriculture and food production because the same processes influencing this system’s responses to global change also play a role in agricultural crop-pollinator and crop-pest interactions. The research has four objectives: 1) Conduct large scale geographic studies of monoecious and gynodioecious fig species to conduct comparative genomic analyses of spatial genetic structure, local adaptation, and the population genetics of species divergence on fig hosts and associated pollinating and non-pollinating fig wasps; 2) Study mechanisms of host attraction to understand their effects on fig diversification and spatial genetic structure; 3) Test the effects of environmental changes and fragmentation on the stability of mutualistic and antagonistic interactions; and 4) Study the genetic mechanisms underlying novel traits involved in synergistic and antagonistic interactions in this system. The proposed research will not only generate critical tests of theory about how host mating system constrains coevolutionary divergence and responses to environmental degradation, but will also help uncover the genetic architecture of traits involved in synergistic and antagonistic interactions between figs and their pollinating and non-pollinating wasps.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.