Abstract
Understanding how species assemble into communities is a key goal in ecology. However, assembly rules are rarely tested experimentally, and their ability to shape real communities is poorly known. We surveyed a diverse community of epiphyte-dwelling ants and found that similar-sized species co-occurred less often than expected. Laboratory experiments demonstrated that invasion was discouraged by the presence of similarly sized resident species. The size difference for which invasion was less likely was the same as that for which wild species exhibited reduced co-occurrence. Finally we explored whether our experimentally derived assembly rules could simulate realistic communities. Communities simulated using size-based species assembly exhibited diversities closer to wild communities than those simulated using size-independent assembly, with results being sensitive to the combination of rules employed. Hence, species segregation in the wild can be driven by competitive species assembly, and this process is sufficient to generate observed species abundance distributions for tropical epiphyte-dwelling ants.
Highlights
Communities can be thought as the culmination of a sequence of serially dependent colonisation events, where the success of each invasion depends on a set of assembly rules (Weiher & Keddy 2001)
We focus on testing whether ants with similar body sizes are more likely to experience competition during species assembly (Davidson 1985), and whether these size-based rules could drive ant community structure
We have demonstrated that ant species in wild ferns are segregated with respect to body size
Summary
Communities can be thought as the culmination of a sequence of serially dependent colonisation events, where the success of each invasion depends on a set of assembly rules (Weiher & Keddy 2001). Significant species segregation across sampling locations is not sufficient to conclude that competitive assembly rules are driving this pattern This is because other processes, such as environmental filtering (Leibold et al 2010), and dispersal limitation (Hubbell 2001) can give rise to species segregation. It is necessary to conduct experimental manipulations to determine: (1) whether segregation relates to competitive species assembly rather than some alternative process and (2) if species do compete, the strength of this interaction Such manipulations have detected segregation within functional groups, and have been predominantly conducted on plant communities (Price & P€artel 2013) ( see Ehmann & MacMahon 1996; Fincke 1999). Since such experiments are only rarely performed, the prevalence of competitive species assembly remains unknown
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