How darkling beetles rose to ‘global ecological dominance’
Darkling beetles belong to the Tenebrionidae family, one of the world’s largest beetle groups with about 30,000 species worldwide, including some 1500 recorded in Australia.
These critters have evolved over the last 150 million years, successfully adapting to – and thriving – in a range of diverse and harsh environments.
But it has never been fully understood how the beetles were able to evolve certain traits and abilities that allowed their evolutionary success and diversity. Until now.
Researchers extracted DNA from museum specimens and digitised more than 900 specimens at CSIRO’s Australian National Insect Collection. The researchers found that evolutionary rates varied between species, with some lineages diversifying more rapidly than others – a scientific concept known as ‘quantum evolution’.
There are approximately 30,000 species of darkling beetles, with around 1500 recorded in Australia. Image credits: shutterstock
“This is how darkling beetles have been able to conquer a variety of environments which have changed over hundreds of millions of years, from tropical savannas and arid deserts, to coastal dunes and mountain tops, and even our backyards,” says lead author Dr Yun (Living) Li, from ANU and CSIRO.
“Our results show that quantum evolution occurred frequently across the evolutionary tree of darkling beetles. We discovered more than 60 rapid evolutionary jumps that are linked to ecological changes in highly specialised environments in which these beetles were living.
“Looking back in time, these beetles underwent periods of rapid bursts of evolution, particularly near the end of the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction event that occurred about 66 million years ago, which wiped out more than 70 per cent of all species on the planet.
“The rapid evolution of darkling beetles has helped them rise to global ecological dominance.”
The research has been published in the Current Biology journal.
