Lace-DEVEX aims at reconstructing the evolutionary history of lacewings, assessing their rates of diversification and extinction, the impact of mass extinctions on their diversity, the loss of functional morphology during their evolutionary history and predicting their vulnerability during the ¿insect decline¿ biodiversity crisis. Lace-DEVEX will frame the phylogenetic and morphological diversity of lacewings in relation to past and present environmental changes and challenges. Lacewings are a small insect clade characterized by long evolutionary history, extensive fossil record and remarkable past and present functional diversity, making them ideal test subjects to reconstruct how they withstood past biodiversity crises and how they will fare in our changing world. A better insight in the evolutionary trajectories of a key insect clade may help to shed light on the ecological traits that were the basis of the evolutionary success of these organisms, which are still poorly understood. Our understanding of the impact of mass extinctions on insect diversity exclusively rely on our knowledge of the fossil record, which is often incomplete. The rampant biodiversity crisis is paying a toll on insect diversity with a potential serious ecological impact. However, how insects will face these challenges and which functional groups are more likely to be lost are still unanswered questions. Unveiling the past events affecting insect evolutionary history may lead to predicting which impacts they will withstand in the future. We will build up an extensive multidisciplinary dataset of lacewing diversity including phylogenetic, morpho-functional and paleontological data, that we will analyze by means of a solid phylogenetic backbone. We will investigate the diversification and extinction events, with emphasis on the loss of functional diversity, assessing the extinction risks for extant ecomorphotypes.
Holometabolous insects are the most diverse and successful animals on the planet, and a key component of all terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems. Their success is likely linked to their development strategy, as their larvae can exploit radically different ecological spaces from those occupied by the adults, so they can be truly defined as organisms with two lives. A better understanding of the events triggering both the diversification and extinction of insect clades considering both their adult and larval life strategies and adaptations is particularly relevant to understanding how insects faced past biodiversity crises and how they will respond to future challenges. Lacewings are a perfect model group to study these dynamics, considering their long evolutionary history, relatively low extant species diversity and overall good state of knowledge of their life history. Lace-DEVEX aims at embracing a multidisciplinary approach putting together genomic, morphological, paleontological, and stratigraphic data to reconstruct the diversification rates and the evolutionary history of holometabolous insects. Morphological information resulting from the investigation of significant fossils through synchrotron tomography will be integrated with genomic data, allowing to assemble an integrated, quantitative phylogenetic framework aimed at investigating the forces that shaped phenotypes over time. The application of Bayesian inference and maximum likelihood analyses to the outputs of integrated phylogenies will then represent a powerful approach allowing to estimate the diversification rates of fossil insect lineages, marking periods of extensive phenotypic evolution and exploitation of new, previously unexplored niches, unveiling the rise of the organisms which contributed to configure the modern ecosystems. One of the goals of these integrated analyses will be the identification of critical phases for insect diversification, testing whether they correspond to other major events in Earth past, such as the appearance of flowering plants. A major innovation in this project is assessing the extinction risk for insect functional groups, which will allow us to infer which of them are more vulnerable and how the extinction may affect insect communities or even whole ecosystems. Such a robust phylogenetic hypothesis based on a last generation dataset will represent the preliminary results to apply with more success probability to EU (ERC) and USA (NSF) funds, with the aim to investigate the much larger and complex hyperdiverse insect clades, such as flies (Diptera).
Expected outcomes
Lace-DEVEX aims at enforcing a multidisciplinary approach to solve the still unanswered questions about insect evolution, diversification, and the role that these organisms had in shaping the current biodiversity and modern ecosystems. The project will break the time barrier between different geological periods, conjugating the past and the future to predict the insects¿ response to human driven environmental changes based on their evolutionary history and how they overcome ancient challenges.
The results will be broadly disseminated through publications on highly ranked multidisciplinary scientific journals.