Inferring the demographic history of an oligophagous grasshopper: Effects of climatic niche stability and host-plant distribution

Understanding the consequences of past environmental changes on the abiotic and biotic components of the landscape and deciphering their impacts on the demographic trajectories of species is a major issue in evolutionary biogeography. In this study, we combine nuclear and mitochondrial genetic data to study the phylogeographical structure and lineage-specific demographic histories of the scrub-legume grasshopper (Chorthippus binotatus binotatus), a montane taxon distributed in the Iberian Peninsula and France that exclusively feeds on certain scrub-legume species. Genetic data and paleo-distribution modelling indicate the presence of four main lineages that seem to have diverged in allopatry and long-term persisted in Iberian and French refugia since the Mid Pleistocene. Comparisons of different demographic hypotheses in an Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) framework supported a population bottleneck in the northwestern French clade and paleo-distribution modelling indicate that the populations of this lineage have experienced more severe environmental fluctuations during the last 21 000 years than those from the Iberian Peninsula. Accordingly, we found that nuclear genetic diversity of the populations of scrub-legume grasshopper is positively associated with local stability of suitable habitats defined by both Pleistocene climate changes and historical distributional shifts of host-plant species. Overall, our study highlights the importance of integrating the potential effects of abiotic (i.e. climate and geography) and biotic components (i.e. inter-specific interactions) into the study of the evolutionary and demographic history of specialist taxa with narrow ecological requirements.

VN was supported by a FPI pre-doctoral fellowship (BES-2012-053741) from Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spain). JO was supported by Severo Ochoa (SEV-2012-0262) and Ramón y Cajal (RYC-2013-12501) research fellowships. This work received financial support from research grants CGL2011-25053, CGL2014-54671-P and CGL2016-8742-R (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad and European Social Fund), POII10-0197-0167 and PEII-2014023-P (Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha and European Social Fund) and UNCM08-1E-018 (European Regional Development Fund).

Peer Reviewed