DISSERTATION RESEARCH: The phylogenetic consequences of mutualism and antagonism in the coevolution of palm flower weevils.

棕榈树广泛分布在热带和亚热带地区，其中许多植物都能产生大量的花朵，吸引数十种昆虫。这些昆虫以不同的方式与它们访问的植物相互作用。有些是传粉者，对植物有益，而另一些则以种子和花朵为食。还有一些昆虫是访客，对植物的生存和繁殖成功几乎没有影响。棕榈花的一个非常常见的游客群体属于一个被称为象鼻虫的甲虫家族。象鼻虫种类繁多，已经描述了大约60，000种，还有更多的物种尚不为科学所知。这个项目将测试关于不同种类的昆虫与植物的相互作用，有益的，有害的或其他的，可能会影响这些食草昆虫的进化。将产生大量关于与女王棕榈属Syagrus有关的象鼻虫的多样性和自然历史的数据，其中包括广泛用于热带和亚热带地区景观美化的几种棕榈树。研究结果将以技术文章的形式传播，也将以公众可以广泛获取的形式传播。最后，本科生和研究生将接受各种分子技术的培训，以研究昆虫进化。棕榈属Syagrus有50多个物种分布在南美洲。在对与近70%的Syagrus物种相关的象鼻虫进行全面调查之后，本研究将使用目标富集和高通量DNA测序方法获得约300种象鼻虫物种的数十个分子标记，并可靠地估计该组的繁殖。由此产生的寄生性将被用来推断这一组多样化和昆虫-宿主相互作用对多样化的影响。通过结合象鼻虫和植物系统发育史的信息，以及每种象鼻虫与其寄主植物之间的相互作用模式，本研究旨在解决棕榈象鼻虫是如何相互关联的，拮抗象鼻虫是否比互惠象鼻虫更专业化，以及互惠象鼻虫的生殖发育是否比拮抗象鼻虫的生殖发育更紧密地匹配其宿主的生殖发育。

Palms are widely distributed throughout the tropics and subtropics, and many of them produce massive floral displays that attract dozens of insect species. These insects interact with the plants that they visit in different ways. Some are pollinators and beneficial to the plant, while others feed on seeds and flowers. Still other insects are visitors that have little impact on the survival and reproductive success of the plant. A very common group of visitors to palm flowers belong to a family of beetles known as weevils. Weevils are incredibly diverse, with around 60,000 species already described and many more still unknown to science. This project will test ideas about how different kinds of insect-plant interactions, beneficial, harmful or otherwise, may affect the evolution of these herbivore insects. A wealth of data will be generated on the diversity and natural history of weevils associated with the Queen palm genus, Syagrus, which includes the several palms widely used for landscaping in tropical and subtropical areas. Results from the research will be disseminated in technical articles, and also in formats broadly accessible to the general public. Finally, undergraduate and graduate students will be trained in diverse molecular techniques for studying insect evolution.The palm genus Syagrus has over 50 species distributed throughout South America. Following a comprehensive survey of weevils associated with nearly 70% of the species of Syagrus, this study will use target enrichment and high-throughput DNA sequencing methods to obtain dozens of molecular markers across ~300 weevil species and reliably estimate the phylogeny of the group. The resulting phylogeny will be used to infer when this group diversified and the influence of insect-host interactions on diversification. By combining information on weevil and plant phylogenetic histories, and mode of interaction between each species of weevil and its host plant, this study aims to address how palm weevils are related to each other, whether antagonistic weevils are more specialized than mutualistic one, and whether the phylogeny of mutualistic weevils matches the phylogeny of their hosts more closely than the phylogeny of antagonistic weevils.