Elvira D'Bastiani

Doutorado | 3° ano

elviradebastianii@gmail.com


Orientadora

Sabrina L. B. Araujo


Coorientadores

Walter A. Boeger

Karla M. Campião

How does the incorporation of new hosts influence the evolution of the consumers?

One of the initial ideas of the consumer-host association is that some consumers are highly specialized in their hosts and, therefore, co-speciation can be expected. However, there is accumulated evidence that consumers are able to incorporate new hosts with independent evolutionary histories. The incorporation and sharing of hosts are mediated by the opportunity and compatibility of interaction, but little is known about how they influence the evolutionary trajectory of consumer species. Therefore, the objective of this study is to evaluate how the evolution of the host influences the evolutionary history of consumers. We propose a genetic model based on consumer individuals (IBM) that can migrate among hosts and genetically differentiate during their evolution. This model assumes that consumer migration rate decays with the host evolutionary time divergence and the intensity of this decay is a parameter of the model. The model allows consumers to evolve over the host phylogeny and limits consumer reproduction to the individuals that use the same host and have a minimum pre-established genetic similarity. Genetic variability arises from genetic recombination between parents and mutation rate. We observed that co-speciation occurs only in extreme situations, where the consumers are not allowed to migrate. Under high migration rates the consumer individuals can maintain the genetic flow decreasing the likelihood of consumer diversification. However, under intermediary values of migration, diversification is favored, which results in more consumers than host species, a recurrent pattern observed in nature. These results support that the host-switching can be an important determinant of community assembly patterns and consumer evolution.
POSTER_D_3_ELVIRA_D'BASTIANI.pdf