Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Silwood Park Campus, Buckhurst Road, Ascot, SL5 7PY, UK. ross.gray12@imperial.ac.uk
  • 2 Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Silwood Park Campus, Buckhurst Road, Ascot, SL5 7PY, UK
  • 3 Forest Research Centre, Forestry Department, P.O. Box 1407, 90715, Sandakan, Sabah, Malaysia
Sci Rep, 2018 03 23;8(1):5131.
PMID: 29572517 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-23272-y

Abstract

Understanding how anthropogenic disturbance influences patterns of community composition and the reinforcing interactive processes that structure communities is important to mitigate threats to biodiversity. Competition is considered a primary reinforcing process, yet little is known concerning disturbance effects on competitive interaction networks. We examined how differences in ant community composition between undisturbed and disturbed Bornean rainforest, is potentially reflected by changes in competitive interactions over a food resource. Comparing 10 primary forest sites to 10 in selectively-logged forest, we found higher genus richness and diversity in the primary forest, with 18.5% and 13.0% of genera endemic to primary and logged respectively. From 180 hours of filming bait cards, we assessed ant-ant interactions, finding that despite considered aggression over food sources, the majority of ant interactions were neutral. Proportion of competitive interactions at bait cards did not differ between forest type, however, the rate and per capita number of competitive interactions was significantly lower in logged forest. Furthermore, the majority of genera showed large changes in aggression-score with often inverse relationships to their occupancy rank. This provides evidence of a shuffled competitive network, and these unexpected changes in aggressive relationships could be considered a type of competitive network re-wiring after disturbance.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.