The Role of Higher Order Interactions in Structuring Competitive Communities: an empirical study in ant communities

ants;ecology;community;School for Environment and Sustainability

Rivera Salinas, IrisVandermeer, John ;

University of Michigan

关键词: ants;    ecology;    community;    School for Environment and Sustainability;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/148872/Rivera%20Salinas_Iris%20Saraeny_Thesis.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Understanding the mechanisms which allow for the maintenance of diverse communities is one ofthe central foci of ecology. Recent work suggests that complex interactions such as trait-mediatedindirect interactions (TMIIs), and more generally higher-order interactions, may play an importantrole in structuring ecological communities. Here we use a well-studied system of arboreal ants incoffee agroecosystems to empirically explore the role of TMII’s in structuring this community.We use, Azteca sericeasur, a dominant arboreal ant which excludes other ants from occupyingcoffee bushes near the trees where its nest is located. Prior work in the system has established aTMIIs between A. sericeasur and its specialist Pseudacteon spp parasitoids. Furthermore, thisTMIIs is far greater on younger nests than older nests. Here we ask how varying strengths of TMIIs/parasitoid pressure influence the community of ants associated with A. sericeasur. For this, wesurveyed A. sericeasur nests of varying ages to understand the influence of the parasitoids on thestructure of the arboreal and leaf litter ant community in space and through time. At each nest wesurveyed the arboreal ants on all the coffee plants that fall within a radius of 8-10 m around thenest. For leaf litter ants, at each nest we traced two linear transects from which we collected sixsamples of .5 m2 of leaf litter, in total 12 samples per nest. Then, the ants from each sample wereextracted using winklers and identified to species and morpho species.Our results show that next to A. sericeasur younger nests the richness of other ants closer to thenest (0-4 m) is higher in comparison to the same distance to older nests where the richness of otherants was lower. Interestingly near old nests the richness of the other ants starts increasing rapidlyat 4 m up to 9 m contrary to the richness of the other ants next to young nests where the richnessfrom 2 m to 6 m remains constant. The results from this study show the potential role of the Trait-Mediated Indirect Interactions in structuring competitive communities, since next to younger nests,the richness of ants is higher in comparison to low density of phorids nests. This particular systemallows us to determine if the communities of ants is different when we have high TMIIs (highdensity of phorids) and low TMIIs (low density of phorids).