Abstract
Recent studies revealed that information on ecological patterns and processes can be investigated using sounds emanating from animal communities. In freshwater environments, animal communities are strongly shaped by key ecological factors such as lateral connectivity and temperature. We predict that those ecological factors are linked to acoustic communities formed by the collection of sounds emitted underwater. To test this prediction, we deployed a passive acoustic monitoring during 15 days in six floodplain channels of the European river Rhône. The six channels differed in their temperature and level of lateral connectivity to the main river. In parallel, we assessed the macroinvertebrate communities of these six channels using classical net sampling methods. A total of 128 sound types and 142 animal taxa were inventoried revealing an important underwater diversity. This diversity, instead of being randomly distributed among the six floodplain channels, was site-specific. Generalized mixed-effects models demonstrated a strong effect of both temperature and lateral connectivity on acoustic community composition. These results, congruent with macroinvertebrate community composition, suggest that acoustic communities reflect the interactions between animal communities and their environment. Overall our study strongly supports the perspectives offered by acoustic monitoring to describe and understand ecological patterns in freshwater environments.
Highlights
Various animals produce sound during communication, sharing information on their identity, location, physiological and behavioural condition or environment[1]
The ecological factors conditioning the presence of species or communities in specific habitat have been investigated to a larger extend than environmental variables conditioning sound emission
Lateral connectivity quantifies the level of connection of the floodplain channels to the main river
Summary
Various animals produce sound during communication, sharing information on their identity, location, physiological and behavioural condition or environment[1]. At different scales of investigation, these sounds bear information about the presence, location, abundance and species interactions This information can be used to study the ecology of populations, communities, and landscapes. Water beetles (Coleoptera), water bugs (Hemiptera), and caddisflies (Trichoptera) are known to emit sounds underwater, mostly for intraspecific communication[9] These taxa are likely to constitute a large fraction of sound sources in freshwater environments as recently testified in temperate ponds[10]. Variation in lateral connectivity is related to a suite of environmental factors depending upon the frequency and duration of connections with the main channel and the associated sheer stress. Such factors include, among others, flow velocity, sediment grain size, and organic content or plant development. Do rheophilous taxa, in particular Ephemeroptera and Trichoptera, and the representation of passive filter-feeders and plurivoltine species[15,16,17,18]
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