Phylogenetic Analysis and the Study of Community Structure

Community structure has been an important matter of concern for the last decades of research in population biology. Ecologists were rarely interested in a historical perspective concerning communities and they studied the structure of contemporary communities mostly according to local interactions among the constituent species. However, a few authors acknowledged that the study of community structure would gain from the use of phylogenetic analysis. For example, following Ross (1972), any community has a history which can be partly explained by the evolutionary history of its component taxa. The evolutionary history of these taxa can in turn be studied using the phylogenetic analysis of their clades. As in any comparative study, phylogenetic analysis can allow us to test for some evolutionary processes (Coddington 1988, 1990, Carpenter 1989, Wanntorp et al. 1990, Brooks and McLennan 1991, Grandcolas et al. 1994, Grandcolas 1997), such as character displacement or character convergence, which can play an important role in shaping communities. These tests can answer the following question: Have species characters changed according either to local interactions in communities or to taxon-specific diversification in their clades? Recently, this phylogenetic perspective has been more often considered in the literature (Brooks and McLennan 1991, 1993, Gorman 1992, Cornell 1993, Losos and Miles 1994). However, few case studies have still been carried out (Losos 1992, 1995, Brooks and McLennan 1993). I address here two points related to the way some ecological concepts have been under-emphasized in these recent studies. I also assess what bias could be produced by the misleading use of ecological concepts in the framework of phylogenetic analysis.