The staggering diversity of life on Earth finds its greatest expression in insects. With one million described species, they constitute over half of all known animals, varying enormously in size, shape, colour, and behaviour. This variety is most remarkable in the Amazon Rainforest; however, our understanding of this critical biodiversity hotspot is limited to patterns of co-occurrence, and falls short of explaining how it came to be.
Most of today’s insect species belong to families that appeared during rapid diversification in the Cretaceous (Benton et al., 2022; Misof et al., 2014), an event that has previously been attributed to co-evolution with angiosperms (flowering plants). However, recent studies have questioned the strength of this interaction prior to the mass extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous, which transformed climate and ecosystems around the world (Asar et al., 2022; Carvalho et al., 2021; Kergoat et al., 2017).
This PhD research will explore the strength and timing of these interactions through the development and application of a cutting-edge mechanistic model of evolution, ‘Gen3sis’ (Hagen et al., 2021). Moving away from approaches that focus on the “what”, the PhD candidate will apply novel deep-time palaeoclimate data in ‘Gen3sis’ to seek out the “how”.
A core aim will be to identify causal mechanisms that drove diversification on evolutionary timescales, revealing the processes that may have driven co-evolution between insects and angiosperms. Guided by the expertise of tropical botany specialists at Kew Science, and modelling experts at Goethe University Frankfurt, this will involve developing a model of evolution that goes beyond existing models by incorporating the varying life histories and interactions of fundamentally different taxa.
Figure 1: Euglossine bees are a tribe of Neotropical bees thought to have co-evolved with orchids, but some research suggests that this dependency was one-sided (Ramírez et al., 2011) (“Euglossini” by Carlos Eduardo Joos, CC BY 2.0)
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The spatially-explicit eco-evolutionary model ‘Gen3sis’ will first be used to establish the relative importance of ecological and evolutionary processes that best captures known diversification of insects and angiosperms in the Amazon, making use of paleoclimate datasets currently being developed by the supervisory team. These increase the temporal depth and precision of available climate data, and also integrate landscape changes from shifting tectonics and millennial timescale climate variability driven by variations in Earth’s orbit.
The student will then work alongside collaborators at the Goethe University Frankfurt and Kew Science to integrate multi-taxa interactions in ‘Gen3sis’ for the first time. The project aims to answer questions such as: how did climate impact diversification dynamics through the Cretaceous and subsequent Paleogene? How have angiosperms driven processes of diversification and extinction in other taxa? Did co-evolution happen at the same rate throughout the Amazon and what characteristics of hotspots were the driving factors?
DRs will be awarded CENTA Training Credits (CTCs) for participation in CENTA-provided and ‘free choice’ external training. One CTC can be earned per 3 hours training, and DRs must accrue 100 CTCs across the three and a half years of their PhD.
Extensive training will be provided through the Open University graduate school and STEM Faculty programmes including core research, engagement, and project management skills in the first year and more specifically targeted training at later stages. These will include communicating research to different audiences, through various channels from academic publication to social media, and transferrable scientific skills useful in both academia and industry, including programming and numerical, statistical, and data processing and visualisation methods.
Boasting an interdisciplinary team including both climate and ecology modellers, this project could be suited to candidates from diverse academic backgrounds including biology, geography, and earth or computer sciences.
This project involves collaboration with Prof. Oskar Hagen who leads the Computational Integrative Biodiversity (CIB) research group at Goethe University Frankfurt’s Centre for Critical Computational Studies (C³S). Prof. Hagen developed the evolutionary model that will be used, and the student will have the opportunity to travel to Frankfurt to collaborate on model development.
The project also involves collaboration with Dr. Alex Monro from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, who will provide expertise and data on angiosperms in the Americas.
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Asar, Y., Ho, S. Y. W., & Sauquet, H. (2022). Early diversifications of angiosperms and their insect pollinators: Were they unlinked? Trends in Plant Science, 27(9), 858–869. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tplants.2022.04.004
Benton, M. J., Wilf, P., & Sauquet, H. (2022). The Angiosperm Terrestrial Revolution and the origins of modern biodiversity. New Phytologist, 233(5), 2017–2035. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.17822
Carvalho, M. R., Jaramillo, C., De La Parra, F., Caballero-Rodríguez, D., Herrera, F., Wing, S., Turner, B. L., D’Apolito, C., Romero-Báez, M., Narváez, P., Martínez, C., Gutierrez, M., Labandeira, C., Bayona, G., Rueda, M., Paez-Reyes, M., Cárdenas, D., Duque, Á., Crowley, J. L., … Silvestro, D. (2021). Extinction at the end-Cretaceous and the origin of modern Neotropical rainforests. Science, 372(6537), 63–68. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abf1969
Hagen, O., Flück, B., Fopp, F., Cabral, J. S., Hartig, F., Pontarp, M., Rangel, T. F., & Pellissier, L. (2021). gen3sis: A general engine for eco-evolutionary simulations of the processes that shape Earth’s biodiversity. PLOS Biology, 19(7), e3001340. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001340
Kergoat, G. J., Meseguer, A. S., & Jousselin, E. (2017). Evolution of Plant–Insect Interactions. In Advances in Botanical Research (Vol. 81, pp. 25–53). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.abr.2016.09.005
Misof, B., Liu, S., Meusemann, K., Peters, R. S., Donath, A., Mayer, C., Frandsen, P. B., Ware, J., Flouri, T., Beutel, R. G., Niehuis, O., Petersen, M., Izquierdo-Carrasco, F., Wappler, T., Rust, J., Aberer, A. J., Aspöck, U., Aspöck, H., Bartel, D., … Zhou, X. (2014). Phylogenomics resolves the timing and pattern of insect evolution. Science, 346(6210), 763–767. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1257570
Ramírez, S. R., Eltz, T., Fujiwara, M. K., Gerlach, G., Goldman-Huertas, B., Tsutsui, N. D., & Pierce, N. E. (2011). Asynchronous Diversification in a Specialized Plant-Pollinator Mutualism. Science, 333(6050), 1742–1746. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1209175
For any enquiries related to this project please contact Neil Edwards, [email protected].
To apply to this project:
You should make your application via The Open University’s applications portal. If you do not already have an account for this portal, you will need to register your interest and will be prompted to create an account. As part of your application, you will need to provide:
Applications must be submitted by 23:59 GMT on Wednesday 6th January 2027.