Assessing the Risk of Invasion by Tephritid Fruit Flies: Intraspecific Divergence Matters

Widely distributed species often show strong phylogeographic structure, with lineages potentially adapted to different biotic and abiotic conditions. The success of an invasion process may thus depend on the intraspecific identity of the introduced propagules. However, pest risk analyses are usually performed without accounting for intraspecific diversity. In this study, we developed bioclimatic models using MaxEnt and boosted regression trees approaches, to predict the potential distribution in Europe of six economically important Tephritid pests (Ceratitis fasciventris (Bezzi), Bactrocera oleae (Rossi), Anastrepha obliqua (Macquart), Anastrepha fraterculus (Wiedemann), Rhagoletis pomonella (Walsh) and Bactrocera cucurbitae (Coquillet)). We considered intraspecific diversity in our risk analyses by independently modeling the distributions of conspecific lineages. The six species displayed different potential distributions in Europe. A strong signal of intraspecific climate envelope divergence was observed in most species. In some cases, conspecific lineages differed strongly in potential distributions suggesting that taxonomic resolution should be accounted for in pest risk analyses. No models (lineage- and species-based approaches) predicted high climatic suitability in the entire invaded range of B. oleae—the only species whose intraspecific identity of invading populations has been elucidated—in California. Host availability appears to play the most important role in shaping the geographic range of this specialist pest. However, climatic suitability values predicted by species-based models are correlated with population densities of B. oleae globally reported in California. Our study highlights how classical taxonomic boundaries may lead to under- or overestimation of the potential pest distributions and encourages accounting for intraspecific diversity when assessing the risk of biological invasion.