Moreno Claudia E, Arita Héctor T, Solis Leonor
Area Académica de Biología, Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo, Apartado Postal 69 Plaza Juárez, 42001 Pachuca, Hidalgo, Mexico.
Oecologia. 2006 Aug;149(1):133-40. doi: 10.1007/s00442-006-0417-0. Epub 2006 Apr 13.
Empirical studies on bat assemblages have shown that richness is not appreciably influenced by local processes such as ecological interactions. However, most of these studies have been done in large areas that include high heterogeneity, and they analyse all bat species within such areas, and thus they may be not reflecting local but supra-community conditions. We followed an ecomorphological approach to assess how bat assemblages of species from the families Phyllostomidae and Mormoopidae, and ensembles of frugivorous bats, are assembled in local habitats within a single landscape. We measured the volume of the space defined by wing morphology and quantified the average distance between species within such a volume. Then, we related these measures to local richness. Such relationships were contrasted against relationships with random assemblages to test for statistical differences. At the ensemble level of organization, we found that the frugivorous bat morphological assembly mechanism is different from random patterns, and it corresponds to the volume-increasing model. On the other hand, bat assembly mechanisms may be ubiquitous at the assemblage level, because groups of species coexisting in a local habitat and delimited only by phylogeny include more than one ecological group with no potential to interact. Assembling processes are crucial to an understanding of species diversity in local communities, and ecomorphological analyses are very promising tools that may help in their study.
对蝙蝠群落的实证研究表明，物种丰富度并未受到诸如生态相互作用等局部过程的显著影响。然而，这些研究大多是在包含高度异质性的大面积区域进行的，并且分析的是此类区域内的所有蝙蝠物种，因此它们可能并未反映局部而是超群落的状况。我们采用生态形态学方法来评估叶口蝠科和妖面蝠科的蝙蝠物种群落，以及食果蝙蝠群体，是如何在单一景观中的局部栖息地中聚集的。我们测量了由翅膀形态所界定的空间体积，并量化了该体积内物种之间的平均距离。然后，我们将这些测量结果与局部丰富度相关联。将这些关系与随机群落的关系进行对比，以检验统计差异。在组织的群体层面，我们发现食果蝙蝠的形态聚集机制不同于随机模式，且符合体积增加模型。另一方面，蝙蝠的聚集机制在群落层面可能是普遍存在的，因为仅由系统发育界定的、在局部栖息地中共存的物种群包含不止一个没有相互作用潜力的生态群体。聚集过程对于理解局部群落中的物种多样性至关重要，而生态形态学分析是非常有前景的工具，可能有助于对其进行研究。
