Abstract
Anthropogenic disturbances, including land use change and exotic species, can alter the diversity and dynamics of ant communities. To examine foraging behavior in an urbanized habitat in northern California, we surveyed the presence of 9 ant species on 876 trees across 4 seasons during both day and night in a 9.5-hectare urbanized oak-exotic woodland. Ants were more likely to be observed on native, evergreen trees, suggesting that native evergreen species may help maintain ant diversity. Species showed clear patterns of temporal partitioning of foraging activity. Ant species varied in their use of native evergreen Quercus agrifolia trees across season and day/night axes. Of the 3 ant species most frequently observed, Camponotus semitestaceus was most active during spring and summer nights, Formica moki was most active during spring and summer days, and Prenolepis imparis was most active during both day and night during fall and winter. Liometopum occidentale was the second most active species during summer day and night, and winter day. Our findings demonstrate that an oak-exotic urban woodland in Northern California was able to maintain a native ant community, and strong temporal partitioning within that community.
Highlights
Anthropogenic disturbances, such as pollution, climate change, habitat modification, and invasive species, can decrease ant species diversity and alter community dynamics (Folgarait 1998; Holway 1998; Floren et al 2008) and create novel ecosystems (Lach et al 2010; Majer et al 2013; Stahlschmidt and Johnson 2018)
Because we found that ants tended to occupy native evergreen trees, we examined whether ant species differed in their use of Quercus agrifolia, the most abundant native evergreen tree, across season and day/night
Native ant species in an urbanized oak-exotic woodland preferentially occupy native evergreen trees, and temporally partition foraging activity among seasons and from day to night. These results indicate that temporal resource partitioning persists in an urbanized ecosystem, building off of previous studies that found that ant communities maintained temporal partitioning in human-modified agroecosystems (Bestelmeyer 2000; Carval et al 2016)
Summary
Anthropogenic disturbances, such as pollution, climate change, habitat modification, and invasive species, can decrease ant species diversity and alter community dynamics (Folgarait 1998; Holway 1998; Floren et al 2008) and create novel ecosystems (Lach et al 2010; Majer et al 2013; Stahlschmidt and Johnson 2018). Unique assemblages of native and exotic tree species are often associated with urbanization (Kunick 1987; Jim 1993; Sjöman et al 2012; Aronson et al 2015; Avolio et al 2015). Native ant biodiversity in northern California is strongly linked to urbanization; disturbed, urbanized habitats have lower native ant species richness but support higher levels of invasive ant species (Vonshak and Gordon 2015). Communities (Vonshak and Gordon 2015; Stahlschmidt and Johnson 2018), to ask whether California native ant species preferentially occupy native or exotic trees, and deciduous or evergreen trees. We studied ants’ occupancy patterns on native and exotic trees in an oak-exotic urban woodland to determine how these trends may extend to an urbanized ecosystem
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