ArticleOecologia2021
Ecosystem engineering in the arboreal realm: heterogeneity of wood-boring beetle cavities and their use by cavity-nesting ants.
Article in Oecologia, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Ecosystem engineering by mud wasps: influence of the environment and nest structure.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2026Article
- Resource suitability drives low use of avian-excavated tree cavities: A multi-state occupancy dynamics approach.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Differential response of fire on the community dynamics of five insect taxa in a tropical mountaintop forest archipelago.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Competition and habitat availability interact to structure arboreal ant communities across scales of ecological organization.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Behavioral response to heat stress of twig-nesting canopy ants.Oecologia · 2022Article
- The effects of high-severity fires on the arboreal ant community of a Neotropical savanna.Oecologia · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Wood-boring beetle larvae act as ecosystem engineers by creating stem cavities that are used secondarily as nests by many arboreal ant species. Understanding the heterogeneity and distribution of available cavities and their use by ants is therefore key to understanding arboreal ant community assembly and diversity. Our goals were to quantify the abundance and diversity of beetle-produced cavity resources in a tropical canopy, reveal how ants use these resources, and determine which characteristics of the cavity resource contribute to ant use. We dissected branches from six common tree species in the Brazilian Cerrado savanna, measuring cavity characteristics and identifying the occupants. We sampled 2310 individual cavities, 576 of which were used as nests by 25 arboreal ant species. We found significant differences among tree species in the proportion of stem length bored by beetles, the number of cavities per stem length, average entrance-hole size, and the distribution of cavity volumes. The likelihood that a cavity was occupied was greater for cavities with larger entrance-hole sizes and larger volumes. In particular, there was a strong positive correlation between mean head diameters of ant species and the mean entrance-hole diameter of the cavities occupied by those ant species. Wood-boring beetles contribute to the structuring of the Cerrado ant community by differentially attacking the available tree species. In so doing, the beetles provide a wide range of entrance-hole sizes which ant species partition based on their body size, and large volume cavities that ants appear to prefer.
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