A comparison of two common flight interception traps to survey tropical arthropods

Abstract

Tropical forests are predicted to harbor most of the insect diversity on earth, but few studies have been conducted to characterize insect communities in tropical forests. One major limitation is the lack of consensus on methods for insect collection. Deciding which insect trap to use is an important consideration for ecologists and entomologists, yet to date few study has presented a quantitative comparison of the results generated by standardized methods in tropical insect communities. Here, we investigate the relative performance of two flight interception traps, the windowpane trap, and the more widely used malaise trap, across a broad gradient of lowland forest types in French Guiana. The windowpane trap consistently collected significantly more Coleoptera and Blattaria than the malaise trap, which proved most effective for Diptera, Hymenoptera, and Hemiptera. Orthoptera and Lepidoptera were not well represented using either trap, suggesting the need for additional methods such as bait traps and light traps. Our results of contrasting trap performance among insect orders underscore the need for complementary trapping strategies using multiple methods for community surveys in tropical forests.

Sweeping beauty: is grassland arthropod community composition effectively estimated by sweep netting?

“…; Lamarre et al. ), coastal sage scrub (Buffington and Redak ), northern tundra (Norment ), shrub/mixed grass prairie (Doxon et al. ), and experimental fields (Evans and Bailey ; Roulston et al.…”

“…The majority of existing studies have contrasted sampling methods in row crops including soybean (Shepard et al 1974;Mayse et al 1978;Kogan and Pitre 1980;Bechinski and Pedigo 1982;Deighan et al 1985), corn and sweet potatoes (Prasifka et al 2007;Reed et al 2010), peanuts (Kharboutli and Mack 1993), cotton (Garcia et al 1982;Nuessly and Sterling 1984;Kharboutli and Allen 2000), and snap bean (McLeod 2000). Other studies have contrasted sampling methods in tropical forests (Sabu et al 2011;Cooper et al 2012;Lamarre et al 2012), coastal sage scrub (Buffington and Redak 1998), northern tundra (Norment 1987), shrub/mixed grass prairie (Doxon et al 2011), and experimental fields (Evans and Bailey 1993;Roulston et al 2007). Typically, these method contrasts are done in tandem to ensure that direct comparisons can be made, but this has not been examined in depth in natural grassland systems.…”

Diversidade De Gafanhotos (Orthoptera: Acridomorpha) De Uma Floresta Primária Da Amazônia Oriental

“…Entretanto, outros fatores contribuem para as poucas informações da entomofauna dessas florestas, entre eles, destacamse: a falta de incentivo à pesquisa, a carência de taxonomistas para garantir a identificação das espécies inventariadas e a falta de padronização dos métodos de amostragem da entomofauna em geral. Este último fator é importante para possibilitar a comparação de informações em uma escala espaço-temporal, oriundas de diferentes regiões (LAMARRE et al, 2012). Todo esse cenário é fundamental para expor as dificuldades que impedem o conhecimento e o entendimento sobre a dinâmica que rege a biodiversidade existente nos diferentes ambientas tropicais.…”

“…Além disso, Lamarre et al (2012), admitem que as comunidades de gafanhotos de dossel parecem ter maior riqueza do que as do subbosque, o que possivelmente aumenta o nível de desconhecimento da entomofauna, devido à dificuldade para a execução de inventários neste estrato florestal.…”

A DNA barcode-based survey of terrestrial arthropods in the Society Islands of French Polynesia: host diversity within the SymbioCode Project

“…Considering the four islands together, 30% of the specimens from low elevation were collected with Malaise traps, compared to 90% of those from high altitude. This sampling effort should be kept in mind when quantifying diversity, because Malaise traps tend to collect relatively more Diptera and Hymenoptera compared to other orders, especially Coleoptera (Gressitt & Gressitt 1962;Lamarre et al 2012). Among the 317 collecting events, 80% took place at low elevation and contained one or a few samples (thanks, notably, to the contribution of middle-school students from the Paopao School of Moorea).…”