Insect egg size and shape evolve with ecology but not developmental rate

Samuel H. Church (), Seth Donoughe, Bruno A. S. de Medeiros and Cassandra G. Extavour ()
Additional contact information
Samuel H. Church: Harvard University
Seth Donoughe: Harvard University
Bruno A. S. de Medeiros: Harvard University
Cassandra G. Extavour: Harvard University

Nature, 2019, vol. 571, issue 7763, 58-62

Abstract: Abstract Over the course of evolution, organism size has diversified markedly. Changes in size are thought to have occurred because of developmental, morphological and/or ecological pressures. To perform phylogenetic tests of the potential effects of these pressures, here we generated a dataset of more than ten thousand descriptions of insect eggs, and combined these with genetic and life-history datasets. We show that, across eight orders of magnitude of variation in egg volume, the relationship between size and shape itself evolves, such that previously predicted global patterns of scaling do not adequately explain the diversity in egg shapes. We show that egg size is not correlated with developmental rate and that, for many insects, egg size is not correlated with adult body size. Instead, we find that the evolution of parasitoidism and aquatic oviposition help to explain the diversification in the size and shape of insect eggs. Our study suggests that where eggs are laid, rather than universal allometric constants, underlies the evolution of insect egg size and shape.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1302-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:571:y:2019:i:7763:d:10.1038_s41586-019-1302-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1302-4

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().