Biogeography of elytral ornaments in Palearctic genus Carabus: disentangling the effects of space, evolution and environment at a continental scale
Abstrakt
We explore the latter two possibilities by analyzing the relationship between morphospace of elytral sculptures of 1,177 sub-species of genus Carabus and environmental variables across the whole Palaearctic, while taking into account spatial and evolutionary autocorrelation. Our results indicate that morphological variability of the sculptures is not influenced by environmental factors and we hypothesize that, at continental scales, the elytral ornaments of genus Carabus are an outcome of environmentally unconstrained neutral evolution-something that has been rarely demonstrated in empirical study.
A surprising by-product of our study is the finding that sub-species within the genus Carabus have an extremely high degree of endemicity which highlights the conservation value of the group.