Habitat size thresholds for predators: Why damselflies only occur in large bromeliads

Srivastava, Diane S.; Ware, Jessica L.; Ngai, Jacqueline T.; Starzomski, Brian M.; Amundrud, Sarah L.

doi:10.1111/btp.12734

Cited by 12 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 70 publications

(96 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…: Amundrud and Srivastava 2015). However, odonates – a dominant predator in the food web – are vulnerable to drought because of their long larval stage (Guzman et al 2019, Srivastava et al 2020a). Therefore, multiple trait axes, as used in our study, are needed to capture traits relevant to drought tolerance, including resistant life forms, larval duration (i.e.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Specifically, the effect of either detrital amount or water volume depended on temporal variation in precipitation and temperature at the field site. This may reflect the ability of large detrital‐filled bromeliads to buffer the effects of climate variation on drought prevalence (Srivastava et al 2020a). Studies of functional traits that use coarse‐grained data such as range maps or remote sensing data cannot test for such cross‐scale effects of the response of the community to local and climatic conditions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Climate influences the response of community functional traits to local conditions in bromeliad invertebrate communities

et al. 2020

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Functional traits determine an organism's performance in a given environment and as such determine which organisms will be found where. Species respond to local conditions, but also to larger scale gradients, such as climate. Trait ecology links these responses of species to community composition and species distributions. Yet, we often do not know which environmental gradients are most important in determining community trait composition at either local or biogeographical scales, or their interaction. Here we quantify the relative contribution of local and climatic conditions to the structure and composition of functional traits found within bromeliad invertebrate communities. We conclude that climate explains more variation in invertebrate trait composition within bromeliads than does local conditions. Importantly, climate mediated the response of traits to local conditions; for example, invertebrates with benthic life‐history traits increased with bromeliad water volume only under certain precipitation regimes. Our ability to detect this and other patterns hinged on the compilation of multiple fine‐grained datasets, allowing us to contrast the effect of climate versus local conditions. We suggest that, in addition to sampling communities at local scales, we need to aggregate studies that span large ranges in climate variation in order to fully understand trait filtering at local, regional and global scales.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate influences the response of community functional traits to local conditions in bromeliad invertebrate communities

et al. 2020

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Life cycle-based strategies, notably those r-strategies that are typical of Culicidae (Céréghino, Pillar, et al, 2018), could possibly be more relevant to recolonization by ovipositing adults once the disturbance has passed (Dézerald et al, 2015). Finally, we did not observe significant changes in the prevalence of predators under drought conditions, though larger body size and longer generation times often make them vulnerable to desiccation and habitat contraction (Romero et al, 2020;Srivastava, Ware, et al, 2020). In summary, predators at our study sites in Puerto Rico, French Guiana and Argentina were opportunist 'mesopredators' (e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Functional redundancy dampens precipitation change impacts on species‐rich invertebrate communities across the Neotropics

Céréghino

Trzcinski

MacDonald³

et al. 2022

Functional Ecology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

1. Animal community responses to extreme climate events can be predicted from the functional traits represented within communities. However, it is unclear whether geographic variation in the response of functional community structure to climate change is primarily driven by physiological matching to local conditions (local adaptation hypothesis) or by differences between species pools in functional redundancy (insurance hypothesis).2. We conducted a coordinated experiment to understand how aquatic invertebrate traits mediate the responses of multitrophic communities to changes in the quantity and evenness of rainfall in 180 natural freshwater microcosms (tank bromeliads) distributed across six sites from 18°N in the Caribbean to 29°S in South America. At each site, we manipulated the mean and dispersion of the daily amount of rainfall that entered tank bromeliads over a 2-month period.

show abstract

“…Although the ecological importance of tank bromeliads is acknowledged, and they have served as model ecosystems for studying trophic interactions and food webs (Srivastava et al, 2020), quantitative models of litter capture and storage in these plants are surprisingly rare. The few published studies generally focus on phytotelm fauna (Carrias et al, 2001; Castaño‐Meneses, 2016; Paoletti et al, 1991; Richardson, 1999), and measurements of bromeliad litter capture (BLC) are only indirect (Ospina‐Bautista & Estévez Varón, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Litter‐trapping tank bromeliads in five different forests: Carbon and nutrient pools and fluxes

2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Bromeliads are the most abundant litter‐trapping plants in Neotropical forest canopies. By intercepting litter, bromeliads obtain and retain nutrients before they reach the pedosphere. Here, we analyzed the litter captured and stored by tank bromeliads (TB) in five different forests along an elevation gradient in Mexico. Among those forests, carbon and nutrient pools and nitrogen fluxes in TB were estimated in a mangrove (MF) and a semi‐deciduous tropical forest (SDTF). The composition of the litter trapped by TB along the gradient was similar to forest litterfall and was mainly composed of leaves. Most of the litter was captured in the dry season, and we found a significant effect of projected plant area and the interaction between month and site on bromeliad litter capture. Moreover, litter stored in TB increased exponentially with projected plant area and differed between three studied bromeliad species. In the MF (with ca. 2,700 TB ha−1), barely ca. 1% of annual litterfall is trapped by these plants, but even in the SDTF, with >10,000 TB ha−1, only ca. 2.4% is captured. We found that carbon and nitrogen pools in TB were small and represented <1% of the carbon and nitrogen stored in forest aboveground biomass. Furthermore, the residence time of litter trapped in TB was similar to that of litter on the forest floor. In the light of our results, we conclude that in the studied forests, the effect of TB on the forest carbon and nutrient cycle is negligible. Abstract in Spain is available with online material.

show abstract

Habitat size thresholds for predators: Why damselflies only occur in large bromeliads

Cited by 12 publications

References 70 publications

Climate influences the response of community functional traits to local conditions in bromeliad invertebrate communities

Climate influences the response of community functional traits to local conditions in bromeliad invertebrate communities

Functional redundancy dampens precipitation change impacts on species‐rich invertebrate communities across the Neotropics

Litter‐trapping tank bromeliads in five different forests: Carbon and nutrient pools and fluxes

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About