Relationship Between Body Mass and Forewing Length in Neotropical Ichneumonidae (Insecta: Hymenoptera)
- PDF / 1,522,757 Bytes
- 9 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 44 Downloads / 152 Views
SYSTEMATICS, MORPHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY
Relationship Between Body Mass and Forewing Length in Neotropical Ichneumonidae (Insecta: Hymenoptera) M MAZÓN1,2 , C NUÑEZ-PENICHET1,3 , ME COBOS1,3 1
Programa de Investigación en Biodiversidad y Servicios Ecosistémicos, Univ Nacional de Loja, Loja, Ecuador Depto de Ciencias Ambientales y Recursos Naturales, Univ de Alicante, Alicante, Spain 3 Dept of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology & Biodiversity Institute, Univ of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA 2
Keywords Ecuador, biomass, log-linear model, morphometry, parasitoids, Venezuela Correspondence M Mazón, Programa de Investigación en Biodiversidad y Servicios Ecosistémicos, Univ Nacional de Loja, Ciudadela Universitaria, sector La Argelia, EC 110101 Loja, Ecuador; marinamazonmor@gmail. com Edited by Anne-Nathalie Volkoff – INRA Received 28 November 2019 and accepted 5 May 2020 * Sociedade Entomológica do Brasil 2020
Abstract Biomass is an important indicator of various ecological factors in insect populations and communities. Although the utility of this variable is proven, it is usually dismissed in ecological studies, generally, because of the difficulty of measuring it. Considering that insect biomass is apparently declining worldwide, here, we aimed to test the accuracy of forewing length as an estimator of body mass in Neotropical Ichneumonidae to help in monitoring insect biomass. Forewing length and dry body mass were measured in 728 individuals from distinct localities in Venezuela and Ecuador. A clear log-linear relationship existed between the two variables, and a log-linear regression had significant and strong predictive power of mass based on wing length. To derive the final values of mass from predictions made using our equation, we used an exponential transformation. We present an R function for predicting mass from wing length. We consider our findings applicable to many Neotropical species of Ichneumonidae, and helpful especially when specimens are measured in dry collections.
Introduction Biomass is an important variable in understanding terrestrial arthropod communities that is nonetheless often dismissed (Saint-Germain et al 2007); however, it offers very helpful ecological information. For instance, it has been used as a proxy for characterizing food-web dynamics, like bird diets (Orihuela-Torres et al 2018), and even for measuring biodiversity quality (Feest et al 2010), being key in many cases for revealing how disturbance affects insect assemblages, and better than richness or abundance (Heleno et al 2008, Shortall et al 2009). Insect biomass is declining worldwide, and this change alerts us about important potential impacts for the future, as many of these species are key in ecosystem processes (Yang & Gratton 2014). According to recent studies, in the past few decades, a decline of ~ 75% in insect biomass has been detected in Europe (Hallmann et al 2017) and in the Tropics (Lister & Garcia 2018). Various causes for
this decline have been hypothesized (e.g., habitat destruction, climate change, invasive
Data Loading...
