My home is your home: Nest boxes for birds and mammals provide habitats for diverse insect communities

Abstract

Cavity‐bearing trees are important nesting sites for many birds and mammals but have become rare due to anthropogenic modification of natural environments. Nest boxes are often used to compensate for the loss of these microhabitats. Nest boxes contain amounts of organic debris exploited by a variety of organisms, mainly insects. We studied the largely unexplored group of nest‐dwelling insects by rearing them from plant detritus and animal remains accumulated in nest boxes of six bird and two mammal species, distributed in forest, farmland and urban environments in Poland. We recorded 119 species representing eight insect orders. Nest substrates composed of plant detritus and animal remains supported similar insect species richness but differed significantly in terms of the insect community composition. Nests of Falco tinnunculus and Tyto alba and also Parus spp. and Strix aluco had very similar insect communities. The structural compositions of insect communities were also similar in nests of Parus spp. and Sturnus vulgaris, and of F. tinnunculus and S. aluco. Flies and earwigs were associated with nests of Parus spp. and Sciurus vulgaris and were more abundant in forests and urban environments, whereas wasps preferred S. aluco nests in forests. Our study shows that nest boxes may serve as replacement habitats for a variety of nest‐associated insects. Therefore, we suggest a more flexible approach to nest boxes maintenance and management, for example, less frequent cleaning or providing more than one nest box in a given place to enhance conservation of nest‐associated insects.

Minute brown scavenger beetles (Coleoptera: Latridiidae) of the Białowieża Primeval Forest

“…3. Numbers of minute brown scavenger beetles (Latridiidae) in selected nature areas in Poland (1 -Gutowski et al, 2020a, 2 -Kubisz et al, 1998Pawłowski et al, 2000, 3 -Byk and Byk, 2004, 4 -Ruta, 2007, 5 -Pawłowski and Kubisz, 2008, 6 -Ruta and Melke, 2002Ruta, 2009, 7 -Buchholz and Melke, 2018, 8 -Rutkiewicz, 2007Gutowski et al, 2010, 9 -Gutowski et al, 2006Plewa et al, 2021a;2021b;2022, 10 -Kubisz andSzafraniec et al, 2019, 11 -Marczak, 2020, 12 -Wiąckowski, 1957Nunberg, 1986;Borowski, 2006;Borowski et al, 2010;Mokrzycki, 2011;Byk et al, 2013;Mazur and Perliński, 2013;Mokrzycki et al, 2013;Jaworski et al, 2021, 13 -unpublished data, 14 -Plewa and Miłkowski, 2018, 15 -Buchholz et al, 2021 (Plewa i in., 2021a).…”

Type of Material, Not Tree Hole Characteristics Shapes Uropodina Mites’ Species Composition in Excavated Tree Holes

“…Bird nests in tree holes constitute an attractive microenvironment for invertebrates from different ecological and systematic groups. In terms of foraging strategies alone, one may find the following organisms: saprophagous species feeding on decomposing nest materials and the prey and dropping remains of birds and mammal [18,19], scavengers and carnivores feeding on all the developmental stages of other invertebrates living commonly in the nest [20][21][22] or vertebrate ectoparasites [23,24].…”

Bird nesting boxes as a specific artificial microenvironment increasing biodiversity of mites from the suborder Uropodina (Acari: Mesostigmata): a case study of Bory Tucholskie National Park

“…Nest boxes serve not only rare vertebrates, for which they are usually built, but also promote growth in biodiversity of other animal groups, especially invertebrates. It has been shown on multiple instances that birdhouses inhabited by birds are also willingly inhabited by representatives of other systematic groups, including Arachnida, Isopoda, Gastropoda, Myriapoda, and numerous Insecta (especially species of Coleoptera, Diptera, Siphonaptera, Hemiptera, Hymenoptera and Lepidoptera), (Nordberg 1936 ; Woodroffe 1953 ; McComb and Noble 1982 ; Tajovský et al 2001 ; Turienzo et al 2010 ; Krištofík et al 2013 ; Broughton et al 2015 ; Boyes 2018 ; Boyes and Lewis 2018 ; Jaworski et al 2022 ). One of the most numerous groups of arthropods found in this type of microhabitat are mites.…”