Food plant shifts drive the diversification of Sack-bearer moths

Lepidoptera are a highly diverse group of herbivorous insects, however some superfamilies have relatively few species. Two alternative hypotheses for drivers of Lepidoptera diversity are shifts in food plant use or shifts from concealed to external feeding as larvae. Many studies address the former hypothesis, but with bias towards externally feeding taxa. One of the most striking examples of species disparity between sister lineages in Lepidoptera is between the concealed feeding Sack-bearer Moths (Mimallonoidea), which contain about 300 species, and externally feeding Macroheterocera, which have over 74,000 species. We provide the first dated tree of Mimallonidae to understand the diversification dynamics of these moths in order to fill a knowledge gap pertaining to drivers of diversity within an important concealed feeding clade. We find that Mimallonidae is an ancient Lepidoptera lineage that originated in the Cretaceous ca. 105 million years ago and has had a close association with...