Previous syntheses have identified the key roles that phylogeny, body size, and trophic level play in determining arthropod stoichiometry. To date, however, detritivores have been largely omitted from such syntheses, despite their importance in nutrient cycling, biodiversity, and food web interactions. Here, we report on a compiled database of the allometry and nutritional stoichiometry (N and P) of detritivorous arthropods. Overall, both N and P content for detritivores varied among major phylogenetic lineages. Detritivore N content was similar to the N content of herbivores, but below that of predators. By contrast, detritivore P content was independent of trophic level. Contrary to previous reports, neither nutrient varied with body size. This analysis places detritivores in the context of related herbivores and predators, and as such, sets the stage for future investigations into the causes and consequences of elemental (mis)matches between detritivores and their detrital resources.

Spatial resource subsidies can greatly affect the composition and dynamics of recipient communities. Caves are especially tractable for studying spatial subsidies because primary productivity is absent. Here, we performed an ecosystem-level manipulation experiment to test the direct influence of detrital subsidies on community structure in terrestrial cave ecosystems. After performing baseline censuses of invertebrates, we removed all organic material from 12 caves and constructed exclusion boxes to prevent natural resource inputs. Next, we stocked each cave with standardized quantities of two major natural subsidies to caves: leaves (leaf packs) and carcasses (commercially supplied rodents), and measured the invertebrate colonization and utilization of these resources for 23 months. Over the course of the experiment, 102 morphospecies were observed. Diplopods and collembolans were most abundant on leaf packs, and dipteran larvae and collembolans were most abundant on the rats. On average, caves receiving either treatment did not differ in species richness, but abundance was significantly higher in rat caves over both the duration of the experiment and the temporal "life" of the individual resources, which were restocked upon exhaustion. Post-manipulation invertebrate communities differed predictably depending on the type of subsidy introduced. Over the course of the experiment, caves that received the same subsidy clustered together based on community composition. In addition, the invertebrate community utilizing the resource changed over the duration of the two-year experiment, and evidence of succession (i.e., directional change) was observed. Results from this study demonstrate how allochthonous resources can drive the community dynamics of terrestrial invertebrates in cave ecosystems and highlight the need for consideration of the surface environment when managing and protecting these unique habitats.

SUMMARY1. The causes of distribution patterns of stygobionts (obligate subterranean-dwelling aquatic species) were examined with special emphasis on vicariance and dispersal. 2. Dispersal was investigated on the premise that if migration is important, then migration at small scales should predict patterns at larger scales. Data on the copepod fauna of epikarst in Slovenia were especially useful for the study of migration, because data on habitat occupancy could be collected at scales of individual drips located metres apart to the scale of individual caves to entire karst regions. Occupancy of drips in one cave was a remarkably good predictor of occupancy of caves in a region, although not of the overall range of a given species. These results were also supported by occupancy patterns of the general stygobiotic fauna of West Virginia caves, compared at different scales. 3. Vicariance was investigated by noting that proximity to marine embayments increases the likelihood of vicariant speciation. In the U.S.A., only the fauna of the Edwards Aquifer of Texas has a significant component of marine-derived species. Differences in shape of the relationship between species number and number of caves in a county indicated that the marine-derived component represented an addition to rather than a replacement of the other stygobiotic species. 4. Thus, we found evidence for the importance of both vicariance and dispersal. The techniques employed could be used to study these patterns more generally, as more data become available.

Ecological stoichiometry has emerged as a tool for exploring nutrient demand and evolutionary responses to nutrient limitation. Previous studies of insects have found predictable variability in stoichiometry, both in relation to body size and trophic mode, at ordinal levels or higher. Our study further examines the evolutionary and ecological lability in these traits by comparing the effects of body size, trophic mode (larval and adult) and larval habitat on the stoichiometry of insects within one order (Diptera). The study also expands on previous work by analyzing trophic mode both at coarse (detritivore, herbivore, predator) and fine (high‐ vs low‐ nutrient quality resources within trophic categories) scales and by comparing nutrient stoichiometry in two geographical regions, Sweden and Arizona. As predicted, adults feeding on nectar or pollen had the lowest body N content in the dataset. Additionally, for Diptera with predatory larvae, species low N diets had lower body N content than those with high N diets. However, body N content was not consistently lower for all species with low N resources, as species feeding on plant material were indistinguishable in stoichiometry from predators with high N diets. We suggest that these results emerge because larval resource exploitation is poorly understood in herbivorous Diptera species. Body P content for Swedish Diptera decreased with body size for all trophic modes, and the only difference among trophic modes was that blood feeders had higher P content than other groups. The regional comparison further showed that the allometry of body P content is a labile trait that may vary at regional scales, as there was no allometric scaling of body P content in the Arizona data set, in contrast to the Swedish data set. These results are not easily explained by existing theoretical frameworks, but instead point to a general context‐dependence of P stoichiometry, which should now be a focus for future work.

Central-place foragers, such as ants, beavers, and colonial seabirds, can act as biological conduits, subsidizing local communities with allochthonous resources. To explore the consequences of such biologically vectored resource redistribution, we draw on an example from cave ecology and develop a population-level model of central-place foraging based on the dispersal kernel framework. We explore how the size of the patch in which central-place foraging occurs and the spatial distribution of foragers within that patch feed back to influence the population dynamics of the central-place forager and the species richness of the associated recipient community. We demonstrate that the particular way in which a population of central-place foragers uses space has two important effects. First, space use determines the stability of the forager population and establishes patch size thresholds for persistence, stable equilibria, and limit cycles. Second, alternative foraging kernels lead to qualitatively different scaling relationships between the size of the foraging patch and species richness back at the central place. These analyses provide a new link among elements of ecology related to animal behavior, population dynamics, and species diversity while also providing a novel perspective on the utility of integrodifference equations for problems in spatial ecology.