Plants, plant-feeding insects, and insect-feeding wasps and flies (known as parasitoids) are central components of terrestrial forest ecosystems. These plants and insects represent more than half of all described organisms in the world and comprise a larger proportion of undiscovered tropical species. This project consists of an intensive plant, caterpillar, and parasitoid insect inventory at the Yanayacu Biological Station (YBS) in the Ecuadorian Andes. The objectives are: 1) to sample and catalog the diverse community of caterpillars and associated parasitoid insects at YBS to discover new species and understand interactions between species; 2) to disseminate this information with a searchable database accessible to scientists and the public throughout the world; and 3) to discover natural history information, such as caterpillar diets, development times, and what insects feed upon specific herbivores and plants. Such information is used to test hypotheses about how diversity evolved and how it affects variables such as ecosystem stability, forest productivity, or ecosystem services.
The intellectual merit of this activity includes significant advances in insect classification by naming new species, developing identification guides, providing specimens with associated molecular data to experts, as well as providing a critical inventory that can be used in conservation efforts in the equatorial Andes (a global hot-spot of biodiversity). These data will also be used to address a variety of basic and applied questions, particularly those associated with climate change and biodiversity. The broader impacts of this project include direct involvement of multiple local field assistants, senior scientists, postdoctoral researchers, collaborating insect specialists, graduate students, and undergraduate students. Therefore the project strengthens international scientific dialogue and relationships. The project includes enhancements in science education and research experience programs for minorities.
Caterpillars and Parasitoids of the Eastern Andes in Ecuador (CAPEA) is a project dedicated to the inventory and dissemination of information on the diversity of interactions between lepidopteran larvae, their host plants, and their parasitoids. This collaborative project involves the work of ecologists and evolutionary biologists working in a diversity of fields related to systematics and taxonomy to achieve the goal of documenting species diversity and interaction diversity in a tropical cloud forest. This survey is part of a successful protocol currently in operation at coordinated sites across the Americas, including Ecuador, Costa Rica, Peru, Brazil, and the US. The co-PIs of this proposal have discovered hundreds of new species and thousands of new interactions, have produced over 90 publications (papers, chapters, and books) including full issues of special feature papers for the Annals of the ESA and the Journal of Insect Science, and have contributed web pages for 1,000+ caterpillar and parasitoid species along with 300+ plant species, on "caterpillars.org" and the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). Selected publications from prior NSF support are listed in the literature cited – these papers have provided significant contributions to the fields of systematics, biodiversity, ecology, and evolution. The CAPEA group currently has over 30 manuscripts either in preparation or in review. The highlights of the work include contributions to biodiversity knowledge and taxonomy via traditional as well as newer integrative approaches, papers characterizing evolutionary patterns via molecular phylogenetics and work that increases our understanding of functional diversity by quantifying specialized consumer-resource relationships and interaction diversity. For the latter, we developed a simple metric of diversity in which richness, diversity indices, and rarefaction diversity are calculated with links rather than single species as the basic unit. This diversity measure, which is affected by taxonomic, genetic, and functional diversity, provides novel insight into debates about neutrality and correlations between diversity, stability, productivity, and ecosystem services. Our biotic survey, one of the most extensive and best documented inventories of interaction diversity on earth, has allowed ecologists to test specific hypotheses about how diversity of interactions varies across major environmental gradients, since it appears to behave differently than taxonomic diversity. Our general survey of plant-caterpillar-parasitoid interactions has been fortified by surveys of caterpillars and parasitoids on focal plant genera, such as Piper (Piperaceae) and Alnus (Betulaceae), allowing for more detailed tests of evolutionary and ecological hypotheses. The CAPEA group has developed thousands of species pages for caterpillars, their host plants, and their parasitoids on "caterpillars.org" and "gusanos.org". More recently, we have focused on publishing species accounts and unique interactions on our parasitoid-caterpillar-plant interactions Lifedesk, which is part of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). We are actively creating this Lifedesk, having already uploaded over 7,000 images of plants and associated immature and adult Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera, and Diptera. This includes roughly 1,000 species and over 2,000 unique interactions, but comprises only 10% of the material we have slated for uploading. In addition to frequent updates to the life history data and images newly available on the web, we have published several new life history descriptions for our focal taxa, many of which represent the first available biological information for particular genera, or even subfamilies. For Lepidoptera, our taxonomic emphasis thus far has been on superfamilies Papilionoidea and Geometroidea, as well as on two important subgroups within Noctuoidea - Notodontidae and Arctiinae (Erebidae). Together these comprise a significant portion of the lepidopteran fauna of eastern Ecuador. Other taxonomic work has focused on the parasitoid wasp family Braconidae and the parasitoid fly family Tachinidae. Taken together, these collaborative efforts provide one of the most in-depth and informative surveys every performed on a tropical community.
