Department of Entomology, Texas A&M University, United States.
Department of Biological Sciences, Mississippi State University, United States.
Curr Opin Insect Sci. 2017 Oct;23:7-12. doi: 10.1016/j.cois.2017.06.006. Epub 2017 Jul 1.
Scale is important in understanding and applying concepts in ecology. Historically, the mechanisms regulating necrophagous arthropod community structure have been well explored on a single vertebrate carcass. However, practically nothing is known of whether such findings can be extrapolated to cases where large numbers of carcasses have been introduced into an ecosystem at a single time point. With the increasing incidences of mass mortality events (MMEs), understanding how scale effects community assembly of necrophagous insects and the resulting bottom-up or top-down effects on the impacted ecosystem are of utmost importance. Unfortunately, MMEs are unpredictable, making their study nearly impossible within a robust experimental framework. The objectives of this paper are to provide a brief overview of what is known with regards to ecological responses to carrion, opine on the ramifications of MMEs on local communities, and provide a brief overview of knowledge gaps, avenues for future research, and a potential study systems for rigorous MME experiments.
规模对于理解和应用生态学概念非常重要。从历史上看，在单个脊椎动物尸体上已经很好地探索了调节腐生性节肢动物群落结构的机制。然而，对于这种发现是否可以推断到在单个时间点将大量尸体引入生态系统的情况，几乎一无所知。随着大规模死亡事件（MME）的发生率不断增加，了解规模效应对腐生性昆虫群落组装的影响以及对受影响生态系统产生的自上而下或自下而上的影响至关重要。不幸的是，MME 是不可预测的，使得在稳健的实验框架内对其进行研究几乎不可能。本文的目的是简要概述一下关于对腐肉的生态反应的了解情况，对 MME 对当地社区的影响发表意见，并简要概述知识空白，未来研究的途径以及严格的 MME 实验的潜在研究系统。
