1 Citation 194 Views 21 Downloads
Climate change is predicted to impact tropical rainforests, with droughts
becoming more frequent and more severe in some regions. We currently have
a poor understanding of how increased drought will change the functioning
of tropical rainforest. In particular, tropical rainforest invertebrates,
which are numerous and biologically important, may respond to drought in
different ways across trophic levels. Ants are a diverse group that carry
out important ecosystem processes, shaping ecosystem structure and
function through predation and competition, which can influence multiple
trophic levels. Hemiptera are a mega-diverse order, abundant in tropical
rainforests and are ecologically important. To understand the roles of
ants in exerting predation and competition pressure on invertebrates in
tropical rainforests during drought and a post-drought period, we
established a large-scale ecosystem manipulation experiment in Maliau
Basin Conservation Area in Malaysian Borneo, suppressing the activity of
ants on four 0.25 ha plots over a two-year period. We sampled hemipterans
found in the leaf litter during a drought (July 2015) and a post-drought
period (September 2016) period. We found significant shifts in the
assemblage of hemipterans sampled from the leaf litter following ant
suppression. Specifically, for ant suppression plots, the species richness
and abundance of herbivorous hemipterans increased only during the
post-drought period. For predatory hemipterans, abundance increased with
ant-suppression regardless of drought conditions, and we found marginal
evidence for a species richness increase during the post-drought period
with little or no change in the drought period. These results illustrate
how ants in tropical forests structure invertebrate communities and how
these effects may vary with climatic variation.
194 views reported since publication in 2020.