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Mutualism describes the ecological interaction between two or more species where each species has a net benefit. Mutualism is a common type of ecological interaction. Prominent examples are:
In biology, coevolution occurs when two or more species reciprocally affect each other's evolution through the process of natural selection. The term sometimes is used for two traits in the same species affecting each other's evolution, as well as gene-culture coevolution.
Weevils are beetles belonging to the superfamily Curculionoidea, known for their elongated snouts. They are usually small – less than 6 mm in length – and herbivorous. Approximately 97,000 species of weevils are known. They belong to several families, with most of them in the family Curculionidae. It also includes bark beetles, which while morphologically dissimilar to other weevils in lacking the distinctive snout, is a subfamily of Curculionidae. Some other beetles, although not closely related, bear the name "weevil", such as the biscuit weevil, which belongs to the family Ptinidae.
Conium is a genus of flowering plants in the family Apiaceae. As of December 2020, Plants of the World Online accepts six species.
The Prodoxidae are a family of moths, generally small in size and nondescript in appearance. They include species of moderate pest status, such as the currant shoot borer, and others of considerable ecological and evolutionary interest, such as various species of "yucca moths".
Chamaerops is a genus of flowering plants in the family Arecaceae. It contains only one species, Chamaerops humilis, variously called European fan palm or the Mediterranean dwarf palm. It is one of the most cold-hardy palms and is used in landscaping in temperate climates.
Herbivores are dependent on plants for food, and have coevolved mechanisms to obtain this food despite the evolution of a diverse arsenal of plant defenses against herbivory. Herbivore adaptations to plant defense have been likened to "offensive traits" and consist of those traits that allow for increased feeding and use of a host. Plants, on the other hand, protect their resources for use in growth and reproduction, by limiting the ability of herbivores to eat them. Relationships between herbivores and their host plants often results in reciprocal evolutionary change. When a herbivore eats a plant it selects for plants that can mount a defensive response, whether the response is incorporated biochemically or physically, or induced as a counterattack. In cases where this relationship demonstrates "specificity", and "reciprocity", the species are thought to have coevolved. The escape and radiation mechanisms for coevolution, presents the idea that adaptations in herbivores and their host plants, has been the driving force behind speciation. The coevolution that occurs between plants and herbivores that ultimately results in the speciation of both can be further explained by the Red Queen hypothesis. This hypothesis states that competitive success and failure evolve back and forth through organizational learning. The act of an organism facing competition with another organism ultimately leads to an increase in the organism's performance due to selection. This increase in competitive success then forces the competing organism to increase its performance through selection as well, thus creating an "arms race" between the two species. Herbivores evolve due to plant defenses because plants must increase their competitive performance first due to herbivore competitive success.
Baptisia alba, commonly called white wild indigo or white false indigo, is a herbaceous perennial plant in the bean family Fabaceae. It is native in central and eastern North America, and is typically found in open woodland areas and prairies with tall grasslands.
Curculio glandium, commonly known as the acorn weevil, is a species of European carpophagus weevil in the genus Curculio, the acorn and nut weevils. It eats by a rostrum, an elongated snout, that is used for piercing.
Angraecum sesquipedale, also known as Darwin's orchid, Christmas orchid, Star of Bethlehem orchid, and king of the angraecums, is an epiphytic orchid in the genus Angraecum endemic to Madagascar. The orchid was first discovered by the French botanist Louis-Marie Aubert du Petit-Thouars in 1798, but was not described until 1822. It is noteworthy for its long spur and its association with the naturalist Charles Darwin, who surmised that the flower was pollinated by a then undiscovered moth with a proboscis whose length was unprecedented at the time. Darwin's prediction went unverified for 21 years after his death, until just such a moth was discovered and his conjecture vindicated. The story of its postulated pollinator has come to be seen as one of the celebrated predictions of the theory of evolution.
Fruits are the mature ovary or ovaries of one or more flowers. They are found in three main anatomical categories: aggregate fruits, multiple fruits, and simple fruits.
Upiga is a monotypic moth genus described by Hahn William Capps in 1964. The genus is placed in the family Crambidae, but has also been placed in Pyralidae. It contains only one species, Upiga virescens, the senita moth, described by George Duryea Hulst in 1900 and found in the Sonoran Desert of North America.
Host–parasite coevolution is a special case of coevolution, where a host and a parasite continually adapt to each other. This can create an evolutionary arms race between them. A more benign possibility is of an evolutionary trade-off between transmission and virulence in the parasite, as if it kills its host too quickly, the parasite will not be able to reproduce either. Another theory, the Red Queen hypothesis, proposes that since both host and parasite have to keep on evolving to keep up with each other, and since sexual reproduction continually creates new combinations of genes, parasitism favours sexual reproduction in the host.
Ecological fitting is "the process whereby organisms colonize and persist in novel environments, use novel resources or form novel associations with other species as a result of the suites of traits that they carry at the time they encounter the novel condition". It can be understood as a situation in which a species' interactions with its biotic and abiotic environment seem to indicate a history of coevolution, when in actuality the relevant traits evolved in response to a different set of biotic and abiotic conditions.
Evolving digital ecological networks are webs of interacting, self-replicating, and evolving computer programs that experience the same major ecological interactions as biological organisms. Despite being computational, these programs evolve quickly in an open-ended way, and starting from only one or two ancestral organisms, the formation of ecological networks can be observed in real-time by tracking interactions between the constantly evolving organism phenotypes. These phenotypes may be defined by combinations of logical computations that digital organisms perform and by expressed behaviors that have evolved. The types and outcomes of interactions between phenotypes are determined by task overlap for logic-defined phenotypes and by responses to encounters in the case of behavioral phenotypes. Biologists use these evolving networks to study active and fundamental topics within evolutionary ecology.
Escape and radiate coevolution is a hypothesis proposing that a coevolutionary 'arms-race' between primary producers and their consumers contributes to the diversification of species by accelerating speciation rates. The hypothesized process involves the evolution of novel defenses in the host, allowing it to "escape" and then "radiate" into differing species.
Exploitative interactions, also known as enemy–victim interactions, is a part of consumer–resource interactions where one organism is the consumer of another organism, typically in a harmful manner. Some examples of this include predator–prey interactions, host–pathogen interactions, and brood parasitism.
John Norton Thompson is an American evolutionary biologist. He is Jean H. Langeheim Professor of Plant Ecology and Evolution at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Pollinator-mediated selection is an evolutionary process occurring in flowering plants, in which the foraging behavior of pollinators differentially selects for certain floral traits. Flowering plant are a diverse group of plants that produce seeds. Their seeds differ from those of gymnosperms in that they are enclosed within a fruit. These plants display a wide range of diversity when it comes to the phenotypic characteristics of their flowers, which attracts a variety of pollinators that participate in biotic interactions with the plant. Since many plants rely on pollen vectors, their interactions with them influence floral traits and also favor efficiency since many vectors are searching for floral rewards like pollen and nectar. Examples of pollinator-mediated selected traits could be those involving the size, shape, color and odor of flowers, corolla tube length and width, size of inflorescence, floral rewards and amount, nectar guides, and phenology. Since these types of traits are likely to be involved in attracting pollinators, they may very well be the result of selection by the pollinators themselves.
The pollination of orchids represents a complex aspect of the biology of this plant family, characterized by intricate flower structures and diverse ecological interactions with pollinator. Notably, the topic has garnered significant scientific interest over time, including the attention of Charles Darwin, who is recognized for his contributions to the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1862, Darwin published his observations on the essential role of insects in orchid pollination in his work The Fertilization of Orchids. He noted that the various strategies employed by orchids to attract their pollinators are complex.
References
- 1 2 Thompson, John N. (24 December 2005). "Coevolution: The Geographic Mosaic of Coevolutionary Arms Races". Current Biology. 15 (24): R992–R994. Bibcode:2005CBio...15.R992T. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2005.11.046 . PMID 16360677. S2CID 16874487.
- 1 2 3 Gomulkiewicz, Richard; Thompson, John N.; Holt, Robert D.; Nuismer, Scott L.; Hochberg, Michael E. (1 August 2000). "Hot Spots, Cold Spots, and the Geographic Mosaic Theory of Coevolution". The American Naturalist. 156 (2): 156–174. doi:10.1086/303382. PMID 10856199. S2CID 4442185.
- 1 2 3 Anderson, Bruce; Johnson, Steven D. (2008). "The Geographical Mosaic of Coevolution in a Plant–Pollinator Mutualism". Evolution. 62 (1): 220–225. doi: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2007.00275.x . PMID 18067570. S2CID 8643749.
- ↑ Arnold, Trevor H. (1993). Plants of Southern Africa: Names and Distribution. National Botanical Institute. ISBN 978-1-874907-03-9.[ page needed ]
- 1 2 Toju, Hirokazu; Sota, Teiji (January 2006). "Imbalance of Predator and Prey Armament: Geographic Clines in Phenotypic Interface and Natural Selection". The American Naturalist. 167 (1): 105–117. doi:10.1086/498277. PMID 16475103. S2CID 20903399.