Jack-of-all-trades is parthenogenetic

Sex is more costly than parthenogenesis, evolutionary ecologists therefore wonder why sex is much more frequent than parthenogenesis in the majority of animal lineages. Parthenogens are as common as or even more common than sexuals in some ancient animal lineages such as mites and rotifers. Here, we analysed oribatid mites (Acari: Oribatida) as model group because these mites are an ancient taxon. There is evidence that the reproductive mode is phylogenetically conserved in oribatid mites, which makes them an ideal model to test hypotheses on the relationship between reproductive mode and species’ ecological strategies. We used oribatid mites to test the frozen niche variation hypothesis; we hypothesized that parthenogenetic oribatid mites occupy narrow specialized ecological niches. We used the geographic range of species as proxy for specialization as specialised species typically do have narrower geographic ranges than generalistic species. Parthenogenetic lineages have a higher prob...