DOI: 10.5061/dryad.6wwpzgn5p
title: Host specificity of herbivorous insects promotes negative species–genetic diversity relationship

description: Although genetic diversity and species diversity in a community often
 covary, the direction and strength of the covariation vary. However, this
 variation in the relationship of these two diversities is poorly
 understood. Here we investigated the role of host-specific herbivores in
 generating species–genetic diversity relationship in plant communities. We
 quantified host specificity for Fagaceae plants–acorn weevil bipartite
 networks in a subtropical forest and modeled the effect of weevil
 herbivory on the relationship. The results showed a consistently negative
 relationship between Fagaceae species diversity and the genetic diversity
 of the dominant species, Lithocarpus glaber. Our analysis showed this
 negative relationship arose from a positive effect of weevil
 host-specificity on Fagaceae plant richness on the one hand and the
 negative effect of weevil host-specificity on the genetic diversity of L.
 glaber on the other hand. This latter negative effect was possibly due to
 differentiated selection of weevils on different genotypes of L. glaber.
 Our study highlights the importance of considering trophic interactions
 and herbivore host-specificity in explaining the species–genetic diversity
 relationship.
description: Leaves of <em>L. glaber</em> trees were sampled in
 November 2013 and March 2015. The genomic DNA was extracted from dried
 leaves of<em> L. glaber </em>after grinding via RIO 101
 (FR120A-230 Thermo). DNA was extracted using the Plant Genomic DNA Kit
 (Tiangen, Beijing, China). Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was carried out
 using 7 pairs of polymorphic SSR primers for <em>L. glaber
 </em>DNA. These highly-specific variable sites were selected from 13
 pairs of polymorphic sites (Zhang <em>et al.</em> 2014). All
 PCR products resolved clearly on 8% polyacrylamide denaturing gels were
 scanned on an ABI 3130 automated sequencer (Applied Biosystems, Foster
 City, California, USA). Allele binning and calling were performed in
 GeneMAPPER version 4.0 (Applied Biosystems). Genotyping was performed
 according to Selkoe and Toonen's (2006) standard.
description: # Host specificity of herbivorous insects promotes negative
 species–genetic diversity relationship We have submitted our raw SSR data
 for all specific genotypes (**LG-SSR-genotype-gg-LQY.xlsx**) and R script
 for each results processing (**SGDR_code-LQY.R**). ## Description of the
 data and file structure **LG-SSR-genotype-gg-LQY.xlsx** * *Sample*: Tree
 individuals - *Population*: Control plots * loci_1 & *LG083*: The
 fragment length (bp) of alleles amplified by PCR using *LG083* (primer) in
 loci 1 - loci_2 & *LG155*: The fragment length (bp) of alleles
 amplified by PCR using *LG155* (primer) in loci 2 * loci_3
 & *LG394*: The fragment length (bp) of alleles amplified by PCR using
 *LG394* (primer) in loci 3 - loci_4 & *LG402*: The fragment length
 (bp) of alleles amplified by PCR using *LG402* (primer) in loci 4 * loci_5
 & *LG422*: The fragment length (bp) of alleles amplified by PCR using
 *LG422* (primer) in loci 5 - loci_6 & *LG430*: The fragment length
 (bp) of alleles amplified by PCR using *LG430* (primer) in loci 6 * loci_7
 & *LG484*: The fragment length (bp) of alleles amplified by PCR using
 *LG484* (primer) in loci 7 If no fragment is amplified at this site, it is
 displayed with a value of 0. ## Code/Software R is required to run
 **SGDR_code-LQY**; the script was created using version RStudio
 2023.06.2+561 "Mountain Hydrangea" Release
 (de44a3118f7963972e24a78b7a1ad48b4be8a217, 2023-08-23) for windows
 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like
 Gecko) RStudio/2023.06.2+561 Chrome/110.0.5481.208 Electron/23.3.0
 Safari/537.36. Annotations are provided throughout the script through 1)
 diversity quantifying , 2) host specificity measuring, 3) correlation
 analyses, and 4) structural equation modeling (SEM) construction.