Plant feeding promotes diversity in the Crustacea

Poore et al. (2017) showed that the ability to eat seaweeds and plants promotes diversity among crustaceans, just as it does among herbivorous insects. The records from OBIS for each clade were analysed to estimate range size, latitudinal range and the occurrence in the biogeographic realms of Spalding et al. (2007). These analyses detected that plant-feeding clades did, on average, have larger range sizes, and that the increases in their richness could not be explained by disproportionate sampling in the tropics or in certain biogeographic regions.