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From kissing to belly stridulation: comparative analysis reveals surprising diversity, rapid evolution, and much homoplasy in the mating behaviour of 27 species of sepsid flies (Diptera: Sepsidae)
Author(s) -
PUNIAMOORTHY N.,
ISMAIL M. R. B.,
TAN D. S. H.,
MEIER R.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
journal of evolutionary biology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.289
H-Index - 128
eISSN - 1420-9101
pISSN - 1010-061X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2009.01826.x
Subject(s) - biology , mating , evolutionary biology , phylogenetic tree , phylogenetics , insect , character evolution , zoology , clade , ecology , gene , genetics
Our understanding of how fast mating behaviour evolves in insects is rather poor due to a lack of comparative studies among insect groups for which phylogenetic relationships are known. Here, we present a detailed study of the mating behaviour of 27 species of Sepsidae (Diptera) for which a well‐resolved and supported phylogeny is available. We demonstrate that mating behaviour is extremely diverse in sepsids with each species having its own mating profile. We define 32 behavioural characters and document them with video clips. Based on sister species comparisons, we provide several examples where mating behaviour evolves faster than all sexually dimorphic morphological traits. Mapping the behaviours onto the molecular tree reveals much homoplasy, comparable to that observed for third positions of mitochondrial protein‐encoding genes. A partitioned Bremer support (PBS) analysis reveals conflict between the molecular and behavioural data, but behavioural characters have higher PBS values per parsimony‐informative character than DNA sequence characters.