Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
PLoS One. 2013 Sep 20;8(9):e74426. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0074426. eCollection 2013.
There are very few studies that have investigated host-specificity among tropical herbivorous insects. Indeed, most of the trophic interactions of herbivorous insects in Southeast Asian tropical rainforests remain unknown, and whether polyphagous feeding is common in the herbivores of this ecosystem has not been determined. The present study employed DNA bar coding to reveal the trophic associations of adult leaf-chewing chrysomelid beetles in a Bornean rainforest. Plant material ingested by the adults was retrieved from the bodies of the insects, and a portion of the chloroplast rbcL sequence was then amplified from this material. The plants were identified at the family level using an existing reference database of chloroplast DNA. Our DNA-based diet analysis of eleven chrysomelid species successfully identified their host plant families and indicated that five beetle species fed on more than two families within the angiosperms, and four species fed on several families of gymnosperms and/or ferns together with multiple angiosperm families. These findings suggest that generalist chrysomelid beetles associated with ecologically and taxonomically distant plants constitute a part of the plant-insect network of the Bornean rainforest.
针对热带食草昆虫的宿主特异性，目前仅有极少数研究进行了调查。事实上，东南亚热带雨林中食草昆虫的大多数营养相互作用仍然未知，而且该生态系统中的食草动物是否普遍存在多食性也尚未确定。本研究采用 DNA 条码技术揭示了婆罗洲雨林中成年咀嚼式叶甲科甲虫的营养联系。从昆虫体内取出成虫摄取的植物材料，并从该材料中扩增出部分叶绿体 rbcL 序列。使用叶绿体 DNA 现有参考数据库，在科水平上对这些植物进行鉴定。我们对 11 种叶甲科物种的基于 DNA 的饮食分析成功确定了它们的宿主植物科，并表明有 5 种甲虫物种以被子植物中的两个以上科为食，4 种物种与多个被子植物科一起以几种裸子植物和/或蕨类植物为食。这些发现表明，与生态和分类上相距甚远的植物相关的广义叶甲科甲虫构成了婆罗洲雨林植物 - 昆虫网络的一部分。
