Abstract
The direct effects of temperature increases and differences among life-history might affect the impacts of native and invasive predators on recipient communities. Comparisons of functional responses can improve our understanding of underlying processes involved in altering species interaction strengths and may predict the effect of species invading new communities. Therefore, we investigated the functional responses of the mourning gecko Lepidodactylus lugubris (Duméril & Bibron, 1836) to explore how temperature, body-size and prey density alter gecko predatory impacts in ecosystems. We quantified the functional responses of juvenile and adult geckos in single-predator experiments at 20, 23 and 26 °C. Both displayed saturating Type-II functional responses, but juvenile functional responses and the novel Functional Response Ratio were positively affected by temperature as juvenile attack rates (a) increased as a function of increased temperature. Handling times (h) tended to shorten at higher temperature for both predator stages. We demonstrate that the effects of temperature on functional responses of geckos differ across ontogeny, perhaps reflecting life-history stages prioritising growth and maturation or body maintenance. This indicates that temperature-dependent gecko predatory impacts will be mediated by population demographics. We advocate further comparisons of functional responses to understand the invasiveness and future predatory impacts of geckos, and other invasive species globally, as temperatures change.
Highlights
The direct effects of temperature increases and differences among life-history might affect the impacts of native and invasive predators on recipient communities
Climate change is pervasive across habitat types and taxonomic groups globally, and effects may interact with other principal drivers, such as habitat loss and invasive species, in altering global biodiversity[1,2]
For juvenile L. lugubris, proportional prey consumption was significantly affected by temperature (χ2 = 6.16, df = 2, p < 0.05) (Fig. 1a), with consumption significantly greater at the 26 °C compared to 20 °C treatments (p < 0.05); other pairwise temperature comparisons were non-significant (p > 0.05)
Summary
The direct effects of temperature increases and differences among life-history might affect the impacts of native and invasive predators on recipient communities. Despite the rare occurrence of sexual reproduction, is mostly based on its parthenogenetic and rapid reproduction rate outgoing from just one individual, with mature females producing a clutch of roughly two eggs every 14–63 days[34,35] This species shows a high variability of abiotic tolerances, but detailed information explaining its invasiveness over such broad geographic and climatic scales is unknown[36,37], especially considering that a substantial variety of lineages thrive in habitats with temperatures below what is considered optimal for foraging[38]. These impacts may be further mediated by demographic characteristics of populations, such as the life-history stages of individual predators
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