Co-occurrence patterns in a diverse arboreal ant community are explained more by competition than habitat requirements
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2016
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Resumo
A major goal of community ecology is to identify the patterns of species associations
and the processes that shape them. Arboreal ants are extremely diverse and abundant,
making them an interesting and valuable group for tackling this issue. Numerous studies
have used observational data of species co-occurrence patterns to infer underlying
assembly processes, but the complexity of these communities has resulted in few solid
conclusions. This study takes advantage of an observational dataset that is unusually
well-structured with respect to habitat attributes (tree species, tree sizes, and vegetation
structure), to disentangle different factors influencing community organization. In
particular, this study assesses the potential role of interspecific competition and habitat
selection on the distribution patterns of an arboreal ant community by incorporating
habitat attributes into the co-occurrence analyses. These findings are then
contrasted against species traits, to explore functional explanations for the identified
community patterns. We ran a suite of null models, first accounting only for the species
incidence in the community and later incorporating habitat attributes in the null
models. We performed analyses with all the species in the community and then with
only the most common species using both a matrix-level approach and a pairwise-level
approach. The co-occurrence patterns did not differ from randomness in the matrixlevel
approach accounting for all ant species in the community. However, a segregated
pattern was detected for the most common ant species. Moreover, with the pairwise
approach, we found a significant number of negative and positive pairs of species associations.
Most of the segregated associations appear to be explained by competitive
interactions between species, not habitat affiliations. This was supported by comparisons
of species traits for significantly associated pairs. These results suggest that competition
is the most important influence on the distribution patterns of arboreal ants
within the focal community. Habitat attributes, in contrast, showed no significant influence
on the matrix-wide results and affected only a few associations. In addition,
the segregated pairs shared more biological characteristic in common than the aggregated
and random ones.
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Palavras-chave
Assembly rules, Brazil, Canopy, Species coexistence, Cerrado, Community assembly, Niche
Citação
CAMAROTA, Flávio et al. Co-occurrence patterns in a diverse arboreal ant community are explained more by competition than habitat requirements. Ecology and Evolution, Nova Jersey, v. 6, n. 24, p. 8907-8918, 2016.