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Related plants tend to share pollinators and herbivores, but strength of phylogenetic signal varies among plant families.

A. Cirtwill,Giulio V. Dalla Riva,Nick J. Baker,Mikael Ohlsson,Isabelle Norström,Inger-Marie Wohlfarth,Joshua A. Thia,Daniel B. Stouffer

Published 2020 in New Phytologist

ABSTRACT

Related plants are often hypothesised to interact with similar sets of pollinators and herbivores, but this idea has only mixed empirical support. This may be because plant families vary in their tendency to share interaction partners. We quantify overlap of interaction partners for all pairs of plants in 59 pollination and 11 herbivory networks based on the numbers of shared and unshared interaction partners (thereby capturing both proportional and absolute overlap). We test 1) for relationships between phylogenetic distance and partner overlap within each network, 2) whether these relationships varied with the composition of the plant community, and 3) whether wellrepresented plant families showed different relationships. Across all networks, more closely-related plants tended to have greater overlap. The strength of this relationship within a network was unrelated to the composition of the network's plant component, but, when considered separately, different plant families showed different relationships between phylogenetic distance and overlap of interaction partners. The variety of relationships between phylogenetic distance and partner overlap in different plant families likely reflects a comparable variety of ecological and evolutionary processes. Considering factors affecting particular species-rich groups within a community may be the key to understanding the distribution of interactions at the network level.

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