This review is the first comprehensive treatment of the biology of nonfrugivorous fruit flies of the family Tephritidae. Feeding habits of destructive and useful species, morphology of immature stages, and hypotheses regarding structural homology and the evolutionary biology of nonfrugivorous tephritids are reviewed, including zoogeography and theories involving resource heterogeneity, guild structure, resource partitioning, resource utilization, facultative niche exploitation, extrinsic and intrinsic factors, host associations, seasonal distribution and phenology, aggregative and circumnatal life history strategies, voltinism, diapause, aestivation, oviposition site, clutch size, and supernumerary oviposition.
PERSPECTIVES AND OVERVIEWThere is no comprehensive family-wide review of the biology of tephritid fruit flies. Reviews exist that focus on economically important taxa within the family (2,8,105,127), discuss regional faunas (9,14,20, 64,86,100,126), or treat one related subject such as gall formation by tephritids (18) or tephritids used in biological control of weeds (67,85,118,121). These reviews are extremely useful and taken together provide good coverage of the Tephritidae, except for a comprehensive picture of the biology and ecology of nonfrugivorous species.Our goal is to review important aspects of nonfrugivorous tephritid biology and ecology, to highlight relevant hypotheses that have been developed, and to suggest where future research may lead. Accordingly, we do not re-review the