Species diversity and community structure in neotropical fruit-feeding butterflies

Abstract

~ ~ ~To test the veracity of previous studies and illuminate major community patterns from an intact community, a guild of nymphalid butterflies was sampled at monthly intervals for five consecutive years by trapping in the canopy and understorey of five contiguous forest plots in the same rainforest. Significant numbers of species belonged to either the canopy or understorey fauna, confirming fundamental vertical stratification, and showing that sampling in one vertical position is a poor estimator of diversity. Significant monthly variation showed that intermittent or short-term sampling would underestimate diversity, and significant variation among years and areas showed that diversity was strongly influenced by sampling year. Even when the underlying communities were the same, temporal interactions strongly affected species diversity in both horizontal and vertical dimensions. An unprecedented seasonal inversion of species richness and abundance was detected between the canopy and understorey that occurred at the onset of all rainy seasons. This investigation suggests that long-term studies evaluating spatial and temporal patterns of species diversity among many sites may be required for a better understanding of tropical communities and how best t o conserve them.

Species diversity and community structure of fruit-feeding butterflies (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae) in an eastern amazonian forest

“…The Whittaker plot and the results from Simpson's diversity and Pielou's evenness reinforce that the studied community is dominated by few abundant species. Similar patterns have been observed in numerous insect communities of tropical forests (DeVries & Walla, 2001;Tonhasca Jr. et al, 2002;Silva & Di Mare, 2012) and appear to be even more prominent in disturbed environments and fragmented landscapes where opportunistic species thrive and sensitive species suffer population declines (Schmidt et al, 2013;Cajaiba et al, 2017).…”

“…Considering that our observed richness was similar to the estimated richness values, we believe that sample biases were not the main drivers of the differences recorded between our study and those from Barlow et al (2007), Ribeiro et al (2012), and Ramos (2000), for example. Also, we consider that other factors that could potentially increase our observed richness, such as sampling in the forest canopy (Devries & Walla, 2001;Fermon et al, 2005), would not significantly change the number of sampled species, since canopy height at SAG rarely exceeds 15 m even in the most preserved sites.…”

Beetle assemblages from an Australian tropical rainforest show that the canopy and the ground strata contribute equally to biodiversity

“…Insect associations with the canopy or ground are likely to vary along a sliding scale, with some entirely associated with a particular stratum and others equally split between strata. These patterns are likely to reflect the specific biology of the species concerned and may even change with season (Devries & Walla 2001), although we have not addressed this possibility here. Our finding that there was vertical stratification in the beetle assemblage concurs with those for other tropical forest insect taxa (Longino & Nadkarni 1990;DeVries et al 1997;Brü hl et al 1998;Rogers & Kitching 1998;Basset et al 2001;Schultze et al 2001;Tanabe 2002;Charles & Basset 2005).…”

“…Despite poor consensus as to whether the canopy or the ground contributes more to global biodiversity, numerous studies on arthropod groups including Collembola (Rogers & Kitching 1998), Lepidoptera (DeVries et al 1997;Devries & Walla 2001;Schultze et al 2001), Formicidae (Longino & Nadkarni 1990;Brü hl et al 1998), Chrysomelidae (Charles & Basset 2005), Drosophila (Diptera; Tanabe 2002) and a range of insect orders (Basset et al 2001), have unequivocally shown that arthropod assemblages in the canopy are very distinct from those that inhabit the ground zone. These differences are likely to be determined by a range of factors including resource availability, microclimate preferences and predator avoidance (Haddow et al 1961;Kato et al 1995;Brü hl et al 1998;Rogers & Kitching 1998;Schultze et al 2001;Tanabe 2002;Basset et al 2003).…”

Temporal Occurrence of TwoMorphoButterflies (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae): Influence of Weather and Food Resources

“…The fruit-feeding butterfly guild is often used in ecological studies in the Neotropics (DeVries & Walla 2001), including Brazil (Brown & Freitas 2000;Uehara-Prado et al 2007;Ribeiro & Freitas 2011). As a consequence, the temporal dynamics of this guild are well known, especially in the Atlantic and Equatorial Amazon Forest (DeVries et al 1997(DeVries et al , 2011DeVries & Walla 2001).…”