Insect herbivores vary in use of hostplant taxa and hostplant tissues, often displaying greater specificity in the latter than the former. Herbivores using different tissues and taxa also differ in apparent frequency of competition and parasitism. We test predictions concerning the relative frequency of shifts in these two dimensions of host use in chrysomeloid beetles by quantifying rates of shift among beetle lineages established using combined analyses of comparative morphology and molecular data. To calculate and compare rates of evolution between larval characters we used a continuous Markov model of character evolution. Overall, tissue use is more conservative than taxon use, though the latter can persist for tens of millions of years.
Species 1: Coleoptera Chrysomelidae (leaf-beetles, longhorned beetles)
Keywords: Phylogeny, evolution
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