Scaling community structure: how bacteria, fungi, and ant taxocenes differentiate along a tropical forest floor

Taxa with smaller individuals tend to have shorter generation times and higher local abundance and diversity. The scaled specialization hypothesis (SSH) posits that taxocenes of smaller individuals should differentiate more rapidly and thoroughly along physiochemical gradients of a given age and ext...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Ecology (Durham) 2010-08, Vol.91 (8), p.2221-2226
Main Authors: Kaspari, Michael, Stevenson, Bradley S, Shik, Jonathan, Kerekes, Jennifer F
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal and plant ecology
Animal, plant and microbial ecology
Animals
Ants
Ants - classification
Ants - physiology
Bacteria
Bacteria - classification
Biodiversity
biogeochemistry
Biological and medical sciences
Biological taxonomies
body size
community structure
Demography
diversity
Forest insects
forest litter
Forestry
Formicidae
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Fungi
Fungi - classification
General aspects
General forest ecology
Generalities. Production, biomass. Quality of wood and forest products. General forest ecology
Insect colonies
Insect ecology
Insects
Microbial ecology
niche
NPK fertilizers
Polymorphism
rain forests
Rainforests
restriction fragment length polymorphism
Soil ecology
species composition
species diversity
Synecology
Taxonomy
Trees
Tropical Climate
tropical forests
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Summary:Taxa with smaller individuals tend to have shorter generation times and higher local abundance and diversity. The scaled specialization hypothesis (SSH) posits that taxocenes of smaller individuals should differentiate more rapidly and thoroughly along physiochemical gradients of a given age and extent. In a Panama rainforest, we evaluated how bacteria, fungi, and ants responded to two such gradients: one topographic and the other arising from nine years of NPK fertilization. Terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) delineated bacteria and fungi operational taxonomic units (OTUs); traditional taxonomy delineated the ants. Bacteria had higher local species richness than fungi and ants (averaging 48 vs. 30 vs. 6 OTUs in
ISSN:0012-9658
1939-9170
DOI:10.1890/09-2089.1