The Effect of Decreasing Temperature on Arthropod Diversity and Abundance in Horse Dung Decomposition Communities of Southeastern Massachusetts

Abstract

Dung from large mammalian herbivores provides a concentrated food resource, rich in bacteria, nitrogen, and many forms of carbon that support a diverse community of arthropods. Detrital communities, while essential to nutrient cycling, are poorly studied. From July 2010 to October 2010, we sampled these arthropod assemblages using pitfall traps baited with horse dung at five sites southeast of Boston, MA. A total of 396 samples were collected, resulting in 10,299 arthropod specimens. We found a highly diverse group of arthropods dominated by Coleoptera (n = 3696) and Diptera (n = 3791) and noted the absence of hymenopterans, a group that was dominant in previous studies on these communities. The community had a high level of evenness (0.93 Shannon evenness) and lacked a dominant species, with no one species obtaining more than 7% relative abundance. Species accumulation curves indicate near maximum diversity was reached for each site and the study as a whole (93% maximum calculated Shannon Diversity). A strong effect of seasonality was also observed on the community, as shown by a strong shift in community at the end of August. The community sampled displayed a high similarity to previous studies, indicating a cosmopolitan distribution as well as an opportunistic community.

Composition and dynamic of benthic macroinvertebrates community in semi-arid area rivers of Burkina Faso (West Africa)

“…Compared to the others studies in some West Africa rivers, Burkina Faso streams appears rich in benthic macroinvertebrates. These results are similar to those reported by Vinson andHawkins (1996), Camara et al (2012), Kearns and Stevenson (2012) and Kaboré et al (2016) who have demonstrated that the sampling technique employed and the types of habitats (e.g. natural habitats, multi-habitats) can explain the high number of taxa found in a given study.…”

Reproductive biology of a viviparous lizard (Mabuya dorsivittata) from the subtropical Wet Chaco of Argentina: geographical variations in response to local environmental pressures

“…In tropical populations, the availability of food for hatchlings could determine the time of births (Vitt and Blackburn 1983); nevertheless, in the more southern populations the environmental temperature could play a more important role, and births in summer probably occur as a result of differences in the opportunities of females to maintain optimum temperature for embryonic development through thermoregulation Swain 2001, Aun et al 2011). Temperature can also indirectly affect the timing of birth, since increases in the diversity and abundance of arthropods in the summer at more southerly sites could be associated with the increase in temperature (Kearns and Stevenson 2012). Nevertheless, maximum accumulation of lipids in fat bodies occurs in late autumn (June) in M. dorsivittata from the Wet Chaco region, when temperature and rainfall drop; thus, availability of food does not seem to be a limitation for this region.…”