• Coarse woody debris (CWD) is returned to Alcoa’s rehabilitated mined areas in the jarrah forest as potential vertebrate fauna habitat, however, its value for invertebrate fauna has not been ...investigated. We sought to determine if CWD in rehabilitated areas supported a similar arthropod fauna to that on fallen logs in the adjacent unmined jarrah forest.
• Using emergence tents, sampling from logs in 5-year old and 15-year old rehabilitated forest, and in unmined forest, yielded 2266 specimens from 187 taxa. Collembola (43% of total) and Acarina (32%) were the most abundant groups, followed by Diptera (11%), Araneae (4%) and Coleoptera (3%).
• There were no significant differences in either taxa richness or overall abundance among the three forest types. However, community composition varied significantly. Species richness from the Araneida, Coleoptera and Diptera was highest in the 5-year old rehabilitated forest, while Collembola and Acarina were better represented in the unmined forest; this was related to changes in the environment surrounding the logs as rehabilitated forest develops, and to log condition. The composition of arthropods on logs in the 15-year old rehabilitated forest was intermediate, indicating a trend of increasing similarity to the unmined forest in arthropod fauna as the rehabilitated forest ages.
• We suggest that over longer time periods, CWD in rehabilitated forest will support arthropod communities similar to those found in unmined forest. Future work should determine if returning logs to mined areas facilitates the return of CWD-dependent taxa.
Rhytidoponera violacea (Forel) (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) is a keystone seed disperser in Kwongan heathl and habitats of southwestern Australia. Like many myrmecochorous ants, little is known about ...the basic biology of this species. In this study various aspects of the biology of R. violacea were examined and the researchers evaluated how these characteristics may influence seed dispersal. R. violacea nesting habits (relatively shallow nests), foraging behavior (scramble competitor and lax food selection criteria), and other life history characteristics complement their role as a mutualist that interacts with the seeds of many plant species.
The influence of temporal variation in the host specificity of invertebrates to estimates of biodiversity is rarely considered. While patterns at large spatial scales have stimulated much attention, ...such comparisons are constrained for southern-hemisphere biomes because the patterning of invertebrates on plants is largely unknown. Here, we analyse variation of plant-dwelling Hemiptera from 15 understorey plant species over 18 months in the south-west Australian biodiversity hotspot. Analyses showed significant interactions in species composition between sampling period and plant species. Fauna that were “effectively specialized” (host-specificity index) to plants changed with season, although this was also related to the number of singletons and overall species richness. Sampling from a single season also overestimated the degree of host specificity by 52% and underestimated the perception of species richness when an outbreak of a particular herbivore occurred. High host-specificity values (12.7 hemipteran species per plant) support the case for high estimates of global arthropod richness.
•The soil texture is one of the determinant factors for ant's species distribution and colonization.•The relationship between soil texture and ant body size influences the survival rate of colonies ...and then the relative density of species.•Changes in soil texture may promote colonization by more aggressive and generalist ants species.•Ants can be used as a tool bioindication of change in soil granulometry promoted by mining and monoculture activities.
Soil granulometric composition can impose constraints on ant species living in ground habitats, being an important factor in defining the habitat templet, which describes how certain animal life histories, including the trait of body size, can be selected. The ant fauna plays a central role in soil formation, and a vast literature describes such influence, but not the converse. Along with termites, worms and other invertebrates, these organisms promote the formation of channels, pores, and aggregates that influence gases and water moving through the soil profile. On the other hand, it is important to understand whether soil traits constrain insect colonization, so we here ask how soil traits can influence niche specificities, which seems to be a neglected ecological issue. A literature search using the key words ‘ants or Formicidae’ and ‘soil structure or pedogenesis’ revealed numerous references dealing with the influence of ants on soil, but not conversely. We here present a novel geomorphologic approach to habitat templets for two distinct riparian Neotropical ecosystems, based on the amalgamation of soil/sediment analysis with ecological processes and ant species biology. We found that predominance of fine grains favoured the preponderance of small ant species at a threshold of <5mm in body length. Based on this, we propose the use of a quantitative, theoretically sound, statistical approach to bioindication.
Monitoring of environmental impacts of mining activities typically focuses on the main operation footprint, neglecting exploration infrastructure like tracks, roads, and drill pads. These areas are ...cleared of native vegetation and impacts on the surrounding environment can be both cumulative and enigmatic. Here, we study the impacts of mining exploration infrastructure on habitat characteristics and ground-dwelling arthropod communities in the Midwest region of Western Australia. The study was conducted at three mine sites, each with three infrastructure types: maintained tracks, unmaintained tracks, and drill pads along transects extending 100 m away from the disturbance into remnant vegetation. Habitat characteristics were measured, and arthropods collected from pitfall traps along these transects and identified using COI metabarcoding. The overall arthropod community and two indicator groups, ants (Formicidae) and springtails (Collembola) - were used to measure arthropod responses to changes in response to habitat disturbance. Whilst changes in habitat were only visible to 10 m from the disturbance, impacts on arthropod communities could be detected up to 100 m into the remnant vegetation, and these responses were more complex. In general, we found similar patterns expressed in the compositional changes for arthropods overall and between our chosen indicator groups, but they were not the same across all sites and infrastructure types. Our results demonstrate the utility of bulk arthropod metabarcoding and different arthropod indicator groups for documenting the effects of fine-scale habitat destruction, degradation, or disturbance. They also highlight the need to monitor the negative impacts of mineral exploration on the environment.
Removal rates of dead fruit flies were used in a tropical dry grassland of Veracruz, Mexico to indicate whether foraging by ants would be higher under isolated trees than in open grassland, and if ...foraging rates would differ seasonally. It was hypothesised that foraging rates would be higher under trees during the dry season, when arboreal food resources were minimal, and when arboreal ants were inclined to forage at ground-level. However, arboreal ant species were more abundant in pitfall traps beneath isolated trees during the wet season months of May and July and they never made up more than 3% of ants sampled at ground-level. Neither the presence of trees nor the dry season increased bait removal rate; removal rate on the ground was significantly higher in the wet season and did not vary with habitat type. Canopy predation by ants decreased in the dry season, suggesting that the arboreal species’ response to the dry season was to reduce activity levels overall, rather than to compensate with increased foraging on the ground. Because of the lack of arboreal ant activity at ground-level, and the high baseline level of ground ant activity in open habitats, isolated trees may have only a limited role in increasing biological control by ants in ground-level crops, such as pasture.
This paper reports on the remarkable results we achieved with a novel, inexpensive collecting method, i.e. band-shelter trapping, during a survey conducted in 25 urban parks and greenbelts in the ...Beijing metropolitan area from April to October during 2007–2009. The trap was made of 3-cm wide, opaque, plastic fiber, wrapped around willow tree trunks (Salix spp.) at a height of 1.5 m height. Traps were checked every two weeks. We collected a total of 45,074 weevils, of which 817 belong to five species unrecorded from China, i.e., Melanapion mandli (Schubert), Asperogronops inaequalis (Boheman), Dorytomus occallescens (Gyllenhal), Ellescus schoenherri (Faust), and Tachyerges pseudostigma (Tempère). Moreover, we collected 43,952 individuals of Melanapion naga (Nakane), Dorytomus alternans Faust, Dorytomus roelofsi Faust, and Dorytomus setosus Zumpt, which are new records for Beijing. The genera Asperogronops Solari and Ellescus Dejean are newly recorded for China. During their seasonal peak, we frequently and abundantly collected D. setosus and D. roelofsi with band-shelter traps, but never by sweeping, beating, or light trapping methods. A review of the biology of these species shows that all have a short active season and prefer shaded tree trunks. Band-shelter traps appear to effectively capture species with these characteristics and underline the importance of collecting methods that take into account the specific life strategy of target species.
Invertebrates are important for restoration processes as they are key drivers of many landscape‐scale ecosystem functions; including pollination, nutrient cycling and soil formation. However, ...invertebrates are often overlooked in restoration monitoring because they are highly diverse, poorly described, and time‐consuming to survey, and require increasingly scarce taxonomic expertise to enable identification. DNA metabarcoding is a relatively new tool for rapid survey that is able to address some of these concerns, and provide information about the taxa with which invertebrates are interacting via food webs and habitat. Here, we evaluate how invertebrate communities may be used to determine ecosystem trajectories during restoration. We collected ground‐dwelling and airborne invertebrates across chronosequences of mine‐site restoration in three ecologically disparate locations in Western Australia and identified invertebrate and plant communities using DNA metabarcoding. Ground‐dwelling invertebrates showed the clearest restoration signals, with communities becoming more similar to reference communities over time. These patterns were weaker in airborne invertebrates, which have higher dispersal abilities and therefore less local fidelity to environmental conditions. Although we detected directional changes in community composition indicative of invertebrate recovery, patterns observed were inconsistent between study locations. The inclusion of plant assays allowed identification of plant species, as well as potential food sources and habitat. We demonstrate that DNA metabarcoding of invertebrate communities can be used to evaluate restoration trajectories. Testing and incorporating new monitoring techniques such as DNA metabarcoding is critical to improving restoration outcomes.
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