The Relationship Between Category Richness and Morphological Diversity in Jewel Beetles

Comment: As an entomologist, I was very pleased to read the article. In which it was found that there is a correlation between the richness of categories (CR) and morphological diversity (MD) of some communities at the local scale, but studies of the entire category using a large dataset are not available. I have a job dedicated to this research for Silphidae. In this study, 1,119 gemstone species from around the world, representing all existing subfamilies, and 33.78% of the genera of Buprestidae were selected as the test group. Geometric morphometric analysis of the contour of homologous characters: pronotum and elytra was carried out to quantitatively assess morphological diversity. The correlation between MD and CR among subfamilies was consistently positive, with the exception of the pronotal genus test in the subfamily category. It was also found that the correlation at the genus level is higher than at the species level, both in the measurements of the pronotum and elytra. Based on our analysis, the hypothesis of positive correlations was expected in the test at the level of the gem beetle genus, but rejected in the test at the species level. The inconsistent correlation between morphological diversity and species richness revealed convergent morphological variability of the pronotum with similar functional diversity in the Buprestidae. Contains important methodological recommendations that will allow the use of similar studies for other families Coleoptera.