<p class="Body"><strong>Network structure of interactions between phytophagous mites and their host-plants in natural ecosystems in Brazil</strong></p>

Abstract

Phytophagous mites represent a diverse group of Arachnida, however, the patterns of their interactions with their host plants remain little explored. Herein we compare structural patterns of plant-phytophagous mite networks of forest and open habitats in Brazil. We adopted network size, network connectance and network modularity to characterize plant-mite network structure. We analyzed 11 plant-mite networks composed by 106 mite species, 96 host-plant species, and 342 distinct interactions. Tetranychidae and Eriophyidae were the most speciose mite families while Euphorbiaceae and Fabaceae were the most relevant host-plant families, hosting 67 and 16 mite species, respectively. We did not find any differences in network size and modularity between biomes and habitat types. However, network connectance was lower for open vegetation habitats than for forest habitat networks. Open areas can constrain the selection of defensive traits by plant species, leading phytophagous mites to consume plant species more selectively, which generates low connectivity in networks of these environments. The small number of plant-mite networks described here highlights the need for more efforts to increase knowledge about plant mites in Brazilian natural vegetation.

Explosive networking: The role of adaptive host radiations and ecological opportunity in a species‐rich host–parasite assembly

“…Most values of the weighted nestedness based on overlap and decreasing fill (NODF w ) (Almeida-Neto & Ulrich, 2011), weighted connectance (C w ) (Bersier et al, 2002), specialisation asymmetry (SA) (Blüthgen et al, 2007), interaction evenness (E i ) (Bersier et al, 2002), and the standardised interaction diversity (H 2 ') (Blüthgen et al, 2006) that differed significantly from the null distributions (NM 1 , NM 2 ) remained unchanged (see Appendix S2.2 for a detailed discussion). No Yes interaction network (Dallas & Presley, 2014), and other fish-parasite (Bellay et al, 2015;Lima Jr et al, 2012) and plant-arthropod systems (de Araújo et al, 2020;de Araújo & Maia, 2021;López-Carretero et al, 2014;Oliveira et al, 2020). This network is also the first to encompass closely related parasite species infecting a host system that is a model for speciation research (see Seehausen, 2006).…”

The role of phylogeny and ecological opportunity in host-parasite interactions: network metrics, host repertoire, and network link prediction.

“…The size of this species network (9901 infections, 473 interactions) is comparable to widely used host-parasite datasets in terms of species richness, e.g. the Global Mammal Parasite Database (GMPD) (Nunn & Altizer 2005), the Sevillata interaction network (Dallas & Presley 2014), and other fishparasite (Lima Jr et al 2012;Bellayet al 2015) and plant-arthropod systems (López-Carreteroet al 2014;de Araújo et al 2020;Oliveira et al2020;de Araújo & Maia 2021). Additionally, the dataset here offers the opportunity to investigate the effects of evolutionary mechanisms, especially adaptive radiation events, on species interactions.…”