Water beetles as models in ecology and evolution

• Main Authors: Bilton, David T., Ribera, Ignacio, Short, Andrew Edward Z.
• Other Authors: European Commission, Agencia Estatal de Investigación (España), Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (España)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Annual Reviews 2019
• Subjects: Coleoptera; habitat shifts; Model organisms; Biogeography; Sexual selection; Indicator taxa; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/206021; https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ento-011118-111829; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100000780; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100011033; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100003329

Beetles have colonized water many times during their history, with some of these events involving extensive evolutionary radiations and multiple transitions between land and water. With over 13,000 described species, they are one of the most diverse macroinvertebrate groups in most nonmarine aquatic habitats and occur on all continents except Antarctica. A combination of wide geographical and ecological range and relatively accessible taxonomy makes these insects an excellent model system for addressing a variety of questions in ecology and evolution. Work on water beetles has recently made important contributions to fields as diverse as DNA taxonomy, macroecology, historical biogeography, sexual selection, and conservation biology, as well as predicting organismal responses to global change. Aquatic beetles have some of the best resolved phylogenies of any comparably diverse insect group, and this, coupled with recent advances in taxonomic and ecological knowledge, is likely to drive an expansion of studies in the future. We are grateful to Steven Routledge for supplying fresh Acilius specimens for imaging and to Jiří Hájek and Ján Kodada for providing some of the habitus images used in Figure 1. Dawn Higginson kindly supplied the sperm images used in Figure 2. D.T.B. is grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for initially funding work on water beetle macroecology. I.R. acknowledges funding from grant CGL2013-48950-C2-1-P (AEI/FEDER, UE).