TY - JOUR
T1 - Few ant species play a central role linking different plant resources in a network in rupestrian grasslands
AU - Costa, Fernanda V.
AU - Mello, Marco A.R.
AU - Bronstein, Judith L.
AU - Guerra, Tadeu J.
AU - Muylaert, Renata L.
AU - Leite, Alice C.
AU - Neves, Frederico S.
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to several colleagues, who helped us in many ways. Nico Blüthgen and two anonymous reviewers helped us to improve the clarity of an earlier version of this manuscript. Affonso H. N. Souza and our colleagues from Insect Ecology Lab, especially Laura D. Braga and Fábio T. Pacelhe, assisted in the field and lab work. We thank Rodrigo Feitosa for ant species identification, Fernando A. O. Silveira and João R. Stehmann for plant species identification, Takumasa Kondo for scale insect identification, Sonia M. N. Lazzari for aphid identification, and John Ribeiro and Pavel Dodonov for their help with analyses. We also are grateful to the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity (ICMBio), Serra do Cipó National Park, and Vellozia Reserve for their logistical support. Our study was funded by the Brazilian Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Brazilian Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), Minas Gerais Research Foundation (FAPEMIG), Research Dean of Federal University of Minas Gerais (PRPq-UFMG), Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH), and the Research Program on the Biodiversity of the Atlantic Forest (PPBio-MA). RLM was funded by São Paulo Research Foundation (Fapesp 2015/17739-4).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Costa et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2016/12
Y1 - 2016/12
N2 - Ant-plant associations are an outstanding model to study the entangled ecological interactions that structure communities. However, most studies of plant-animal networks focus on only one type of resource that mediates these interactions (e.g, nectar or fruits), leading to a biased understanding of community structure. New approaches, however, have made possible to study several interaction types simultaneously through multilayer networks models. Here, we use this approach to ask whether the structural patterns described to date for antplant networks hold when multiple interactions with plant-derived food rewards are considered. We tested whether networks characterized by different resource types differ in specialization and resource partitioning among ants, and whether the identity of the core ant species is similar among resource types. We monitored ant interactions with extrafloral nectaries, flowers, and fruits, as well as trophobiont hemipterans feeding on plants, for one year, in seven rupestrian grassland (campo rupestre) sites in southeastern Brazil. We found a highly tangled ant-plant network in which plants offering different resource types are connected by a few central ant species. The multilayer network had low modularity and specialization, but ant specialization and niche overlap differed according to the type of resource used. Beyond detecting structural differences across networks, our study demonstrates empirically that the core of most central ant species is similar across them. We suggest that foraging strategies of ant species, such as massive recruitment, may determine specialization and resource partitioning in ant-plant interactions. As this core of ant species is involved in multiple ecosystem functions, it may drive the diversity and evolution of the entire campo rupestre community.
AB - Ant-plant associations are an outstanding model to study the entangled ecological interactions that structure communities. However, most studies of plant-animal networks focus on only one type of resource that mediates these interactions (e.g, nectar or fruits), leading to a biased understanding of community structure. New approaches, however, have made possible to study several interaction types simultaneously through multilayer networks models. Here, we use this approach to ask whether the structural patterns described to date for antplant networks hold when multiple interactions with plant-derived food rewards are considered. We tested whether networks characterized by different resource types differ in specialization and resource partitioning among ants, and whether the identity of the core ant species is similar among resource types. We monitored ant interactions with extrafloral nectaries, flowers, and fruits, as well as trophobiont hemipterans feeding on plants, for one year, in seven rupestrian grassland (campo rupestre) sites in southeastern Brazil. We found a highly tangled ant-plant network in which plants offering different resource types are connected by a few central ant species. The multilayer network had low modularity and specialization, but ant specialization and niche overlap differed according to the type of resource used. Beyond detecting structural differences across networks, our study demonstrates empirically that the core of most central ant species is similar across them. We suggest that foraging strategies of ant species, such as massive recruitment, may determine specialization and resource partitioning in ant-plant interactions. As this core of ant species is involved in multiple ecosystem functions, it may drive the diversity and evolution of the entire campo rupestre community.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0167161
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0167161
M3 - Article
C2 - 27911919
AN - SCOPUS:85002388809
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 11
JO - PLoS One
JF - PLoS One
IS - 12
M1 - e0167161
ER -