Researchers rebuild the tree of life of freshwater macroinvertebrates in the European continent
A study from the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute of the University of Barcelona (IRBio-UB) analysed how water macroinvertebrate species, such as beetles, mosquitos and dragonflies, evolved and diversified since their beginnings. With the analysis of the ecological features of about 6,600 European species, researchers rebuilt the functional space they occupy. At the same time, they used DNA sequencing to rebuild the tree of life of aquatic macroinvertebrates showing evolutionary and phylogenic relation between species to estimate when they first appeared and how they evolved. The results show that previous studies were right, suggesting the number of species of each lineage does not depend on the evolutionary time. This study concludes that the oldest lineages have more functional diversity—they can do more things and live in more habitats—than younger ones, whose functional diversity is conditioned by oldest lineages which colonized that habitat previously.