Morphological diversity of ground beetles (Coleoptera: Carabidae) in Scottish agricultural land

Ribera, Ignacio; McCracken, D. I.; Foster, G. N.; Downie, I. S.; Abernethy, V. J.

doi:10.1111/j.1469-7998.1999.tb00188.x

Cited by 33 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…Of the 44 species for which no values were available, measurements were taken from museum specimens. For most of the common species, original specimens caught in our study area were stored in alcohol in the natural history museum Naturalis (Leiden, NL), and thus could be measured using the methodology of Ribera et al (1999). For the remaining species, dried museum specimens were measured at Naturalis, Jiho cesk e Museum, Cesk e Bud ejovice (CZ), and Naturhistorisches Museum Bern (CH) using a micrometer in a stereo microscope and a pinned insect manipulator (Dupont et al 2015).…”

Section: Trait Measurementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Functional differences stabilize beetle communities by weakening interspecific temporal synchrony

Klink

Lepš

Vermeulen

et al. 2019

Ecology

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The temporal stability of communities is essential for the maintenance of ecosystem functioning across trophic levels. The stabilizing effect of biodiversity is, among other factors, modulated by the level of synchrony in population fluctuations among the species in the community. What drives community synchrony, however, remains largely unclear. Community synchrony can be affected by external drivers such as disturbances, but also by the properties of the community. Species with different ecological strategies should fluctuate less synchronously than more similar species; thus, an increase in diversity of ecological strategies should decrease synchrony, and increase the stability of the community. Here, using an exceptionally large data set of ground beetle trappings in Dutch heathlands (~370,000 individuals in 19 plots, each sampled between 9 and 36 yr), we assess the drivers of community stability and synchrony, and their relationship with disturbance, species richness, and functional diversity (FD). We found no effect of disturbance (fire and topsoil removal) on community stability or synchrony, probably because of unpredictable patterns of increase or decrease of the populations. Community synchrony was overall positive, giving more support for independent and positive correlation between species than for compensatory dynamics. Synchrony decreased with increasing FD, but not with species richness. Supporting this, we found that the more species pairs differ in their traits, the less synchronously their populations fluctuate, where 74% of all pairs showed no significant correlation. Significant positive synchrony (19% of species pairs) was concentrated among pairs with low trait dissimilarity, and the 7% of pairs with significant negative temporal correlation showed no relation with pairwise functional dissimilarity. The stabilizing effect of FD via decreased synchrony supports largely untested theoretical expectations that an increased diversity of functional strategies in a community will have a stabilizing effect on community abundance. We hypothesize that because competition is low in this community, the stabilizing effect of FD reflects interspecific variation in responses to environmental fluctuations rather than competition.

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Section: Trait Measurementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To test for differences between wet and dry specimens, both wet and dry specimens of three abundant species (Poecilus lepidus, Calathus erratus, and Harpalus solitaris) were measured. For 11 other species, measurements were taken to compare to the values of Ribera et al (1999).…”

Section: Trait Measurementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Functional differences stabilize beetle communities by weakening interspecific temporal synchrony

Klink

Lepš

Vermeulen

et al. 2019

Ecology

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“…Management management intensity index (see Materials and Methods: Environmental data) tributes, following previous studies that showed their likely functional significance, as assessed with phylogenetic comparative methods (Ribera et al 1999a, b, and references therein). They included major linear dimensions of the body, hind legs, eyes, and antennae, following the approach of previous work (e.g., Forsythe 1987, Ribera et al 1999a). Six specimens were measured per species, one male and one female from three different localities and dates, to avoid possible biases due to sexual dimorphism, and geographical or temporal variability.…”

Section: Morphological Characteristics Of the Speciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Measurements were chosen to best characterize shape, not taxonomic characters. They included major linear dimensions of the body, hind legs, eyes, and antennae, following the approach of previous work (e.g., Forsythe 1987, Ribera et al 1999a). All quantitative variables were normalized by a log-transformation prior to analysis.…”

Section: Morphological Characteristics Of the Speciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effect of Land Disturbance and Stress on Species Traits of Ground Beetle Assemblages

Ribera¹,

Dolédec

Downie³

et al. 2001

Ecology

366

240

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In this paper we test whether the morphology and life traits of species (in our case ground beetles of the family Carabidae) can be related to the main underlying axes of environmental variability of their habitats. Sites were selected a priori to maximize two gradients: land use as a general measure of disturbance characterized by an index of land management, and habitat adversity or stress as characterized by elevation and vegetation structure. The underlying environmental axes and the relationships of the morphology and life traits of the species with them were investigated using RLQ analysis, a multivariate ordination method able to relate a species trait table to a site characteristics table by way of a species abundance table. The first environmental axis was highly statistically significant and explained most of the variability. It was strongly negatively related to the intensity of land management, and positively related to increasing elevation and a set of variables reflecting vegetation stress. Two predictions were tested and found to be valid in the studied system: in highly managed lowland sites species were smaller, and the frequency of macropterous species (with better dispersal abilities) was higher. Other traits also showed significant relationships with the main environmental axis: in the intensively managed lowland sites species had broader bodies, longer trochanters, and wider femora (characters associated with plant eaters), were paler in color, overwintered only as adults, bred in spring or autumn, and were active in summer. We conclude that the ground beetle assemblages of the studied sites respond in a similar way to the same underlying environmental factors. This allows the precise definition of functional groups, which can be used to characterize functional diversity and its relationships with changes in land management.

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“…Morphology is surely the most easily obtainable, repeatable and accurately measurable dimension associated with ecological diversity, and documenting patterns of morphological variation and their underlying causes is among the main goals of evolutionary biology (Gould, 1991;Foote, 1997;Carroll, 2001). Specifically, studying large-scale patterns of morphological variation and recognizing main trends in morphospace are fundamental first steps in investigating the adaptive nature of the morphological traits of species living under different ecological conditions, as well as in understanding the interplay of morphological and ecological diversification (Wainwright & Reilly, 1994;Foote, 1997;Ribera et al, 1999a). Ants, which often have morphologi-cally variable worker castes and are ecologically dominant (H¨olldobler & Wilson, 1990), pose compelling questions concerning the evolution of animal form and function.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Morphological evolution in a hyperdiverse clade: the ant genus Pheidole

Pie

Traniello

2006

Journal of Zoology

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Understanding patterns of morphological variation and their evolutionary causes is among the main goals of evolutionary biology. In this paper we analyse the pattern of morphological variation in the hyperdiverse ant genus Pheidole (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). We describe the morphospace defined by 231 Pheidole species in the New World using 18 linear quantitative characters. The first ordination axis of the morphospace was found to mainly reflect differences in body size, which explained 83.2 and 78.6% of all morphological variation in minor and major worker subcastes, respectively. Therefore, despite considerable morphological divergence among Pheidole species, most of this variation can be attributed to allometric changes along a size axis, leaving little opportunity for ecological specialization that might be reflected in the studied morphological traits. Simulations suggest that this degree of concentration of variance on the first principal component is unlikely to be due solely to shared phylogenetic history. The second ordination axis reflected mostly variation in head characters, most notably antennal scape length. The third ordination axis described aspects of alitrunk and petiole shape. Although generally concordant, the loading patterns in the second and third axes differed between minors and majors, suggesting different selective pressures affecting the evolution of each subcaste. These general trends in shape were confirmed by additional analyses that corrected for body size. Ordination analyses were complemented by comparing patterns of interspecific morphological covariation in minors and majors of Pheidole using newly developed analyses based on the statistical concept of conditional independence of Magwene. A comparison between worker subcastes indicated substantial reorganization in the pattern of character covariation, particularly through a decrease in character-correlation levels (dissociation). Moreover, graphical modelling indicated correlations between characters in widely different parts of the body, suggesting that the opportunity for morphological evolution in Pheidole appears to be surprisingly limited. This result might explain why morphological evolution in Pheidole has been highly conservative in spite of substantial ecological diversification.

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Morphological diversity of ground beetles (Coleoptera: Carabidae) in Scottish agricultural land

Cited by 33 publications

References 47 publications

Functional differences stabilize beetle communities by weakening interspecific temporal synchrony

Functional differences stabilize beetle communities by weakening interspecific temporal synchrony

Effect of Land Disturbance and Stress on Species Traits of Ground Beetle Assemblages

Morphological evolution in a hyperdiverse clade: the ant genus Pheidole

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