Fundamental and realized feeding niche breadths of sexual and asexual stick insects

The factors contributing to the maintenance of sex over asexuality in natural populations remain unclear. Ecological divergences between sexual and asexual lineages could help to maintain reproductive polymorphisms, at least transiently, but the consequences of asexuality for the evolution of ecological niches are unknown. Here, we investigated how niche breadths change in transitions from sexual reproduction to asexuality. We used host plant ranges as a proxy to compare the realized feeding niche breadths of five independently derived asexual Timema stick insects’ species and their sexual relatives at both the species and population levels. Asexual species had a systematically narrower realized niche than sexual species, though this pattern was not apparent at the population level. To investigate how the narrower realized niches of asexual species arise, we performed feeding experiments to estimate fundamental niche breadths but found no systematic differences between reproductive mode...