A central goal of modern biology is to understand the origin and maintenance of biodiversity. In particular, understanding the enormous diversity of tropical communities has been a serious challenge. The research group addresses this challenge by using a well-studied tropical system composed of plants, specialist caterpillars feeding exclusively on this group of plants, and a group of specialist wasps that attack the caterpillars. The diversity within each of these groups is enormous (>2,000 species), and the goal for this project is to better understand the evolution of biodiversity by testing specific hypotheses addressing patterns of plant chemical evolution and the role of plant chemistry in biodiversity. To address these hypotheses, the collaborative group consists of two synthetic chemists to elucidate the plant chemistry, one molecular ecologist to reconstruct the evolutionary history of each group, three taxonomists to describe and identify organisms, and two chemical ecologists to describe the interaction between each group.
The hypothesis that the evolution of one organismal group (i.e. plants) can affect the evolution of another interacting group (i.e. caterpillars) is not a new idea; however, the approach to address this hypothesis is novel, as they focus on multiple feeding groups (plants, caterpillars, wasps), which has rarely been undertaken. In addition, the diverse collaborative team allows the team to thoroughly explore all aspects of this system to yield high explanatory power for the question addressed. Finally, understanding the evolution of biodiversity will help with conservation efforts to maintain species rich ecosystems so that the interactions that give structure to ecosystems remain intact.
