Patterns of ant activity and nesting ecology depend on flooding intensity in a Neotropical floodplain
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE
Patterns of ant activity and nesting ecology depend on flooding intensity in a Neotropical floodplain Emily Khazan 1,2,3 & Jelena Bujan 4 & Brett R. Scheffers 2,1 Received: 12 November 2019 / Accepted: 14 April 2020 # African Association of Insect Scientists 2020
Abstract Disturbance shapes ecological communities. Frequency, predictability, and intensity characterize disturbances, which select for resistant and/or resilient traits of species. Unpredictable and infrequent disturbance events, especially those with no reliable cues, lack selection strength and have less calculable effects on species assemblages and trait-based species sorting. In a flood plain in Northeast Costa Rica, across sites with varying flood frequency and no reliable cues to signal flooding, we used ants as a focal taxon to assess the impact of disturbance on ant activity and species assemblage. We examined activity patterns such as extent of occupancy of baits and nesting guild (i.e. strata used) that might mediate the effects of stochastic flood events. We hypothesized that the ant community in the most frequently flooded site would be dominated by above-ground nesting ants whose nesting traits make them resilient to inundation. The site with the most frequent flooding had the lowest level of ant presence on baits and differed in species assemblage, as demonstrated by the analysis of similarity, compared with the sites with lower flooding frequency. Neither overall species richness nor richness of species in the above-ground nesting guild differed between sites. However, nesting in trees above flood waters may be beneficial to escape frequent and unreliable flooding of habitats, and, as we hypothesized, there was greater activity of above-ground nesting ants compared with ground nesting ants in the most frequently flooded site. These differences in nesting guilds were diminished in the drier sites. Keywords Arboreality . Caño Palma . Community ecology . Costa Rica . Flooding . Formicidae
Introduction Flooding, as an ecological disturbance can be experienced by organisms anywhere along the spectra of predictability and intensity and can shape ecological communities (Pickett & White 1985). How communities respond to disturbances often depends on the timing, duration, extent, and/or disturbance
* Emily Khazan [email protected] 1
School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Florida, 103 Black Hall, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA
2
Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida, 110 Newins-Ziegler Hall, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA
3
Caño Palma Biological Station, Canadian Organization for Tropical Education and Rainforest Conservation (COTERC), Tortuguero, Limón, Costa Rica
4
Department of Biology, 139 Life Sciences Building, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292, USA
interval (Poff et al. 1997) – all of which characterize the predictability and intensity of disturbance. Unpredictable floods are capable of extirpating ground-dwelling organisms that cannot escape flood w
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