Breaking taboos in the tropics: incest promotes colonization by wood‐boring beetles

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Abstract
Inbreeding and parthenogenesis are especially frequent in colonizing species of plants and animals, and inbreeding in wood‐boring species in the weevil families Scolytinae and Platypodidae is especially common on small islands. In order to study the relationship between colonization success, island attributes and mating system in these beetles, we analysed the relative proportions of inbreeders and outbreeders for 45 Pacific and Old World tropical islands plus two adjacent mainland sites, and scored islands for size, distance from nearest source population, and maximum altitude. The numbers of wood‐borer species decreased with decreasing island size, as expected; the degree of isolation and maximum island altitude had negligible effects on total species numbers. Numbers of outbreeding species decreased more rapidly with island size than did those of inbreeders. Comparing species with similar ecology (e.g. ambrosia beetles) showed that this difference was best explained by differential success in colonization, rather than by differences in resource utilization or sampling biases. This conclusion was further supported by analyses of data from small islands, which suggested that outbreeding species have a higher degree of endemism and that inbreeding species are generally more widespread. Recently established small populations necessarily go through a period of severe inbreeding, which should affect inbreeding species much less than outbreeding ones. In addition, non‐genetic ecological and behavioural (‘Allee’) effects are also expected to reduce the success of outbreeding colonists much more than that of inbreeders: compared with inbreeders, outbreeders are expected to have slower growth rates, have greater difficulties with mate‐location and be vulnerable to random extinction over a longer period.

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