Morphological traits as predictors of diet and microhabitat use in a diverse beetle assemblage
By P. Barton, H. Gibb, A. Manning, David B. Lindenmayer, S. Cunningham. 2011
83 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We explored how morphological traits can complement phylogenetic information to extend our predictions of the ecology of a diverse beetle assemblage. We analysed ten morphological traits from an assemblage of 239 species from 35 families, and identified three axes of morphological variation that were independent of body length: (1) relative robustness; (2) relative appendage length; and (3) relative abdomen length. The trait associations defining these axes of morphological variation did not change after adjusting for family-level phylogeny. We detected significant differences in morphological variation across the beetle assemblage according to diet and microhabitat use, and these patterns were only partially influenced by family membership. Further analysis within dominant families showed that species of Carabidae, Curculionidae, Scarabaeidae and Staphylinidae had greater body length in open versus tree litter microhabitat, and species of Carabidae and Curculionidae had greater relative robustness, but shorter relative appendage length, in open versus tree litter microhabitat. Although it is clear that family-level phylogeny and morphology share some explanatory power for predicting the diet and microhabitat use by beetles, we demonstrate that body length, robustness and appendage length are correlated significantly with microhabitat use when comparing members of the same family. © 2011 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2011, 102, 301–310.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Insect Science, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2d0e7a237ff25146dae2b5ef953bad3514c94466
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Insect Science
In Nature and Landscape Conservation
Citations in the corpus
- Carabids.org – a dynamic online database of ground beetle species traits (Coleoptera, Carabidae) (2014, background): “Food and hunting preferences are well documented for many carabid species and partly studied on small spatial and/or taxonomic scales (Hengeveld, 1980b; Melber, 1983; Mundy et al., 2000; Barton et al., 2011).”
- Moving beyond the guild concept: developing a practical functional trait framework for terrestrial beetles (2015, methodology): “E-mail: nfountainjones@gmail.com such taxonomic data may restrict the predictive powers of community studies (McGill et al., 2006; Menezes et al., 2010; Barton et al., 2011), especially when comparing regions with different species pools.”