Climate and regional plant richness drive diet specialization in butterfly caterpillars (opens in new tab)

Studies of coevolution, ecosystem processes, and latitudinal diversity gradients are improved by understanding variation in resource specialization. Insect herbivory is one of the most ubiquitous terrestrial ecological associations, and is important for understanding the evolution of both plants and insects, yet the processes underlying global variation in diet breadth remain poorly understood. Here, we use global datasets of butterfly and plant distributions to investigate the patterns and d...