Abstract
Ants are ecologically dominant and have been used as valuable bio-indicators of environmental change or disturbance being used in monitoring inventories. However, the majority of inventories has concentrated in ground-dwelling ant fauna disregarding the arboreal fauna. This paper aimed to list the ant species collected both on the ground and in the vegetation of the Parque Estadual do Cristalino, an important protected site in the center of the southern Amazon. Moreover, we compared the composition of the ground dwelling and vegetation foraging ants. Was sampled 203 species distributed among 23 genera and eight subfamilies, wherein 35 species had not yet been reported in the literature for Mato Grosso State. As expected, the abundance and richness of ants was higher on the ground than in the understory. Also, the ant assemblages composition was different between these habitats (with only 20% occurring in both). It indicate that complementary methods which include arboreal and terrestrial ants are indicated for efficient inventory. This study provides an inventory of the arboreal and ground ant fauna contributing to the knowledge and conservation of ant fauna of the Amazonian.
Highlights
Ants are ecologically dominant, playing several ecosystem services in the environment (Del Toro et al, 2012) and occupying the most varied habitats (Bruhl et al, 1998; Dejean et al, 2015; Rocha et al 2015; Pape et al, 2016)
Whereas inventories are fundamental to promote conservation of tropical forest remnants and the ants are important components of biodiversity, this work aims to contribute to the knowledge of the Amazonian ground-dwelling and arboreal ant fauna
Of the inventories on ant assemblages conducted in the Amazon, the major part of the studies focused just on grounddwelling ants (Miranda et al, 2012; Souza et al, 2012, 2015; Baccaro et al, 2013) and few comprised both terrestrial and arboreal ant fauna detailing the strata in which each species was collected (e.g.: Vasconcelos & Vilhena, 2006; Ryder-Wilkie et al, 2010)
Summary
Ants are ecologically dominant, playing several ecosystem services in the environment (Del Toro et al, 2012) and occupying the most varied habitats (Bruhl et al, 1998; Dejean et al, 2015; Rocha et al 2015; Pape et al, 2016). Ants have been used as a model to understand the various ecological patterns and as valuable bio-indicators of environmental change or disturbance (Andersen et al, 2002; Bruna et al, 2014; Falcão et al, 2015) Regardless of their ecological importance and diversity, studies on Brazilian ant fauna were usually concentrated in the Atlantic Forest (Feitosa & Ribeiro, 2005; Figueiredo et al, 2013; Silva et al, 2007), the Cerrado (Dáttilo et al, 2012b; Silva & Brandão, 2014; Camacho & Vasconcelos, 2015), and Pantanal (Ribas & Schoereder, 2007; Silva et al, 2013; Meurer et al, 2015). Studies in the southern Amazon region are few, and because they focus on local ecological patterns, the list of species therein usually does not have confirmation of specialists and comprises a
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