Trait-mediated indirect interactions (TMII) can be as important as density-mediated indirect interactions. Here, we provide evidence for a novel trait-mediated cascade (where one TMII affects another TMII) and demonstrate that the mechanism consists of a predator eavesdropping on chemical signaling. Ants protect scale insects from predation by adult coccinellid beetles – the first TMII. However, parasitic phorid flies reduce ant foraging activity by 50% – the second TMII, providing a window of opportunity for female beetles to oviposit in high-quality microsites. Beetle larvae are protected from ant predation and benefit from living in patches with high scale densities. We demonstrate that female beetles can detect pheromones released by the ant when attacked by phorids, and that only females, and especially gravid females, are attracted to the ant pheromone. As ants reduce their movement when under attack by phorids, we conclude that phorids facilitate beetle oviposition, thus producing the TMII cascade.
Whether an ecological community is controlled from above or below remains a popular framework that continues generating interesting research questions and takes on especially important meaning in agroecosystems. We describe the regulation from above of three coffee herbivores, a leaf herbivore (the green coffee scale, Coccus viridis), a seed predator (the coffee berry borer, Hypothenemus hampei), and a plant pathogen (the coffee rust disease, caused by Hemelia vastatrix) by various natural enemies, emphasizing the remarkable complexity involved. We emphasize the intersection of this classical question of ecology with the burgeoning field of complex systems, including references to chaos, critical transitions, hysteresis, basin or boundary collision, and spatial self-organization, all aimed at the applied question of pest control in the coffee agroecosystem.
This paper provides a synthesis of the ecological impact of phorid fly parasitoids on ants. We find the most important impact of phorids on ants to be trait-mediated effects. Phorids diminish the foraging activity of ants, frequently reducing the number and average size of foragers and reducing the amount of food retrieved by a colony. However, ants' coping mechanisms include changing foraging site and time. Phorids can also affect competition, especially through changes in the ability of the host to win in exploitative competition. Factors such as microclimate, resource size, and habitat complexity interact with phorids to change their effect on competition. By being highly specific and attacking ants high in the competitive hierarchy, phorids can alter the linear nature of the competitive transitivity, and by reducing the number of foragers, they can change the discovery-dominance tradeoff that is observed in some ant communities. Trait-mediated effects of phorids also cascade to other trophic levels. As an example, we discuss the trait-mediated cascade of phorids on theAzteca instabilissystem in coffee. In this system, by reducing the foraging activity ofA. instabilis, phorids reduce the direct and indirect biological control impact of the ant in the coffee agroecosystem.
Resumen: Introducción. La insuficiencia velofaríngea es quizá la secuela más común de las técnicas de veloplastia realizadas para la corrección de las fisuras palatinas. A menudo la terapia fonoaudiológica se encuentra limitada, obteniéndose generalmente sólo resultados parciales. En estos casos la faringoplastia se presenta como el tratamiento de elección, existiendo diversas técnicas publicadas. Éstas, cualesquiera que sean, tienen en común la utilización de colgajos faríngeos que determinan una reducción del diámetro de la vía aérea superior con el consiguiente riesgo de generar un trastorno obstructivo del sueño. Objetivos. En el ánimo de obviar esta situación y simultáneamente alargar y dar competencia velopalatina, se ha diseñado una técnica quirúrgica que tiene por objetivo la reconstrucción morfofuncional velar o veloplastia funcional secundaria, inspirada en los principios de Delaire. Material y técnica quirúrgica. Presentamos nuestra experiencia basada en una serie de 15 casos tratados de esta nueva manera: se divide completamente el paladar blando, incindiendo sobre la línea media y exponiendo ambos hemivelos hasta la región retrouvular. En ese momento se busca e identifican las estructuras musculares remanentes, se separan del borde óseo palatino y de las mucosa nasal y bucal y se unen en una posición más posterior con las contralaterales en la línea media. Resultados. En nuestra experiencia se ha logrado el alargamiento velopalatino y la corrección o mejoramiento de rinolalias. En la evaluación de resultados hemos utilizado tanto el examen clínico fonoaudiológico como la aerofonoscopía con muy buenos resultados comparativos.
Most species are embedded in multi-interaction networks. Consequently, theories focusing on simple pair-wise interactions cannot predict ecological and/or evolutionary outcomes. This study explores how cascading higher-order interactions (HOIs) would affect the population dynamics of a focal species. Employing a system that involves a myrmecophylic beetle, a parasitic wasp that attacks the beetle, an ant, and a parasitic fly that attacks the ant, the study explores how none, one, and two HOIs affect the parasitism and the sex ratio of the beetle. We conducted mesocosm experiments to examine these HOIs on beetle survival and sex ratio and found that the 1st degree HOI does not change the beetle’s survival rate or sex ratio. However, the 2nd degree HOI significantly reduces the beetle’s survival rate and changes its sex ratio from even to strongly female-biased. We applied Bayes’ theorem to analyze the per capita survival probability of female vs. male beetles and suggested that the unexpected results might arise from complex eco-evolutionary dynamics involved with the 1st and 2nd degree HOIs. Field data suggested the HOIs significantly regulate the sex ratio of the beetle. As the same structure of HOIs appears in other systems, we believe the complexity associated with the 2nd degree HOI would be more common than known and deserve more scientific attention.
Most species are embedded in multi-interaction networks. Consequently, theories focusing on simple pair-wise interactions cannot predict ecological and/or evolutionary outcomes. This study explores how cascading higher-order interactions (HOIs) would affect the population dynamics of a focal species. Employing a system that involves a myrmecophylic beetle, a parasitic wasp that attacks the beetle, an ant, and a parasitic fly that attacks the ant, the study explores how none, one, and two HOIs affect the parasitism and the sex ratio of the beetle. We conducted mesocosm experiments to examine these HOIs on beetle survival and sex ratio and found that the 1st degree HOI does not change the beetle’s survival rate or sex ratio. However, the 2nd degree HOI significantly reduces the beetle’s survival rate and changes its sex ratio from even to strongly female-biased. We applied Bayes’ theorem to analyze the per capita survival probability of female vs. male beetles and suggested that the unexpected results might arise from complex eco-evolutionary dynamics involved with the 1st and 2nd degree HOIs. Field data suggested the HOIs significantly regulate the sex ratio of the beetle. As the same structure of HOIs appears in other systems, we believe the complexity associated with the 2nd degree HOI would be more common than known and deserve more scientific attention.
Most species are embedded in multi-interaction networks. Consequently, theories focusing on simple pair-wise interactions cannot predict ecological and/or evolutionary outcomes. This study explores how cascading higher-order interactions (HOIs) would affect the population dynamics of a focal species. Employing a system that involves a myrmecophylic beetle, a parasitic wasp that attacks the beetle, an ant, and a parasitic fly that attacks the ant, the study explores how none, one, and two HOIs affect the parasitism and the sex ratio of the beetle. We conducted mesocosm experiments to examine these HOIs on beetle survival and sex ratio and found that the 1st degree HOI does not change the beetle’s survival rate or sex ratio. However, the 2nd degree HOI significantly reduces the beetle’s survival rate and changes its sex ratio from even to strongly female-biased. We applied Bayes’ theorem to analyze the per capita survival probability of female vs. male beetles and suggested that the unexpected results might arise from complex eco-evolutionary dynamics involved with the 1st and 2nd degree HOIs. Field data suggested the HOIs significantly regulate the sex ratio of the beetle. As the same structure of HOIs appears in other systems, we believe the complexity associated with the 2nd degree HOI would be more common than known and deserve more scientific attention.
The research data repository of the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) is building on over 30 years of data curation research and experience in the National Science Foundation-funded US Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network. It provides mature functionalities, well established workflows, and now publishes all ‘long-tail’ environmental data. High quality scientific metadata are enforced through automatic checks against community developed rules and the Ecological Metadata Language (EML) standard. Although the EDI repository is far along in making its data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR), representatives from EDI and the LTER are developing best practices for the edge cases in environmental data publishing. One of these is the vast amount of imagery taken in the context of ecological research, ranging from wildlife camera traps to plankton imaging systems to aerial photography. Many images are used in biodiversity research for community analyses (e.g., individual counts, species cover, biovolume, productivity), while others are taken to study animal behavior and landscape-level change. Some examples from the LTER Network include: using photos of a heron colony to measure provisioning rates for chicks (Clarkson and Erwin 2018) or identifying changes in plant cover and functional type through time (Peters et al. 2020). Multi-spectral images are employed to identify prairie species. Underwater photo quads are used to monitor changes in benthic biodiversity (Edmunds 2015). Sosik et al. (2020) used a continuous Imaging FlowCytobot to identify and measure phyto- and microzooplankton. Cameras at McMurdo Dry Valleys assess snow and ice cover on Antarctic lakes allowing estimation of primary production (Myers 2019). It has been standard practice to publish numerical data extracted from images in EDI; however, the supporting imagery generally has not been made publicly available. Our goal in developing best practices for documenting and archiving these images is for them to be discovered and re-used. Our examples demonstrate several issues. The research questions, and hence, the image subjects are variable. Images frequently come in logical sets of time series. The size of such sets can be large and only some images may be contributed to a dedicated specialized repository. Finally, these images are taken in a larger monitoring context where many other environmental data are collected at the same time and location. Currently, a typical approach to publishing image data in EDI are packages containing compressed (ZIP or tar) files with the images, a directory manifest with additional image-specific metadata, and a package-level EML metadata file. Images in the compressed archive may be organized within directories with filenames corresponding to treatments, locations, time periods, individuals, or other grouping attributes. Additionally, the directory manifest table has columns for each attribute. Package-level metadata include standard coverage elements (e.g., date, time, location) and sampling methods. This approach of archiving logical ‘sets’ of images reduces the effort of providing metadata for each image when most information would be repeated, but at the expense of not making every image individually searchable. The latter may be overcome if the provided manifest contains standard metadata that would allow searching and automatic integration with other images.
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