Article type : Articles Tropical insect diversity: evidence of greater host specialization in seed-feeding weevils Guille Peguero1,2,9, Raúl Bonal3,4, Daniel Sol2,5, Alberto Muñoz2,6, Victoria L. Sork7,8 and Josep Maria Espelta2 Article 1 Global Ecology Unit CREAF-CEAB-CSIC-UAB, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Catalonia, Spain 2 CREAF, Cerdanyola del Vallès, 08193 Catalonia, Spain 3 Forest Research Group (GIF), INDEHESA, University of Extremadura, Spain 4 DITEG Research Group, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain 5 CSIC, Cerdanyola del Vallès, 08193 Catalonia, Spain 6 Departamento de Didáctica de las Ciencias Experimentales, Facultad de Educación, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain 7 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA 8 Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not Accepted been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi: 10.1002/ecy.1910 This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. 9 Corresponding Author. E-mail:
[email protected] Present address: Center of Excellence PLECO (Plant and Vegetation Ecology), Biology Department, University of Antwerp, Universiteitsplein 1, Wilrijk, Belgium Running head: Specialization in seed-feeding insects Manuscript received 27 March 2017; revised 27 April 2017; accepted 10 May 2017. Corresponding Editor: Lee A. Dyer Abstract. Host specialization has long been hypothesized to explain the extraordinary Article diversity of phytophagous insects in the tropics. However, addressing this hypothesis has proved challenging because of the risk of over-looking rare interactions, and hence biasing specialization estimations, and the difficulties to separate the diversity component attributable to insect specialization from that related to host diversity.