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Abstract

Understanding the ecological conditions promoting diversification of lineages has been one of the major challenges in the field of evolutionary ecology. The ecological theory of adaptive radiation identified two potential conditions to divergence; selection resulting from differences between environments and from the interaction between species. So far, the best explained factor is differences between environmental features giving rise to divergence of lineages. Most of the other cases on adaptive radiation indicated that resource competition is an important process underlying diversification, although the roles of the other species interactions are not explicitly tested. Predation, for instance, is still underexplored, despite having both ecological and evolutionary impacts on prey populations. Role of predation on diversification remained unsettled, as field studies are challenging and experimental studies showed its modifying effect when selection is driven by resource competition. Importantly, the interacting effects of different ecological processes on diversification should be evaluated in detail. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the importance of predation, and its effect on diversification when predation and resource competition are both present.