The ability to parasitize living hosts as well as decompose dead organic matter is both common and widespread across prokaryotic and eukaryotic taxa. These parasitic decomposers have long been considered merely accidental or facultative parasites. However, this is often untrue: in many cases, parasitism is integral to the ecology and evolution of these organisms. Combining life cycle information from the literature with a gene...

Cryptic species diversity is a major challenge regarding the species‐rich community of parasitoids attacking oak gall wasps due to a high degree of sexual dimorphism, morphological plasticity, small size and poorly known biology. As such, we know very little about the number of species present, nor the evolutionary forces responsible for generating this diversity. One hypothesis is that trait diversity in the gall wasps, inclu...