Adaptation to divergent environments creates and maintains biological diversity, but we know little about the importance of different agents of ecological divergence. Coevolution in obligate mutualisms has been hypothesized to drive divergence, but this contention has rarely been tested against alternative ecological explanations. Here, we use a well-established example of coevolution in an obligate pollination mutualism, Yucca brevifolia and its two pollinating yucca moths, to test the hypothesis that divergence in this system is the result of mutualists adapting to different abiotic environments as opposed to coevolution between mutualists. We used a combination of principal component analyses and ecological niche modeling to determine whether varieties of Y. brevifolia associated with different pollinators specialize on different environments. Yucca brevifolia occupies a diverse range of climates. When the two varieties can disperse to similar environments, they occupy similar habitats. This suggests that the two varieties have not specialized on distinct habitats. In turn, this suggests that nonclimatic factors, such as the biotic interaction between Y. brevifolia and its pollinators, are responsible for evolutionary divergence in this system.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 15. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 01 July 2016.
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#2,619,675
of 28,833,811 outputs
Outputs from New Phytologist
#2,353
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#8,392
of 127,034 outputs
Outputs of similar age from New Phytologist
#5
of 42 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 28,833,811 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 90th percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 10,990 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 13.6. This one has done well, scoring higher than 78% of its peers.
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