Dawson Blake M, Wallman James F, Evans Maldwyn J, Barton Philip S
Centre for Sustainable Ecosystem Solutions, School of Earth, Atmospheric and Life Sciences, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia.
Faculty of Science, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW, Australia.
Oecologia. 2022 Apr;198(4):1043-1056. doi: 10.1007/s00442-022-05145-4. Epub 2022 Mar 16.
Resource quality is a key driver of species abundance and community structure. Carrion is unique among resources due to its high nutritional quality, rapidly changing nature, and the diverse community of organisms it supports. Yet the role resource quality plays in driving variation in abundance patterns of carrion-associated species remains poorly studied. Here we investigate how species abundances change with a measure of resource change, and interpret these findings to determine how species differ in their association with carrion that changes in quality over time. We conducted field succession experiments using pigs and humans over two winters and one summer. We quantified the effect of total body score, an objective measure of resource change, on adult insect abundance using generalised additive models. For each species, phases of increasing abundance likely indicated attraction to a high-quality resource, and length of abundance maxima indicated optimal oviposition and feeding time. Some species such as the beetle Necrobia rufipes had a rapid spike in abundance, suggesting a narrow window of opportunity for carrion resource exploitation, while species like the wasp Nasonia vitripennis had a gradual change in abundance, indicating a wide window of resource exploitation. Different abundance patterns were also observed between species occurring on pigs and humans, suggesting cadaver type is an important aspect of resource quality. Our findings show that species abundances, unlike species occurrences, can reveal additional detail about species exploitation of carrion and provide information about how resource quality may drive competition and variation in insect community succession.
资源质量是物种丰富度和群落结构的关键驱动因素。腐肉在资源中独具特色，因其营养质量高、性质变化迅速，且能支持多样的生物群落。然而，资源质量在驱动与腐肉相关物种丰富度模式变化中所起的作用仍未得到充分研究。在此，我们研究物种丰富度如何随资源变化的一种度量而改变，并解读这些发现，以确定物种在与随时间质量发生变化的腐肉的关联上有何不同。我们在两个冬季和一个夏季使用猪和人类尸体进行了野外演替实验。我们使用广义相加模型量化了总体得分（一种资源变化的客观度量）对成虫丰度的影响。对于每个物种，丰度增加的阶段可能表明对高质量资源的吸引，而丰度最大值的持续时间表明最佳产卵和取食时间。一些物种，如甲虫赤足郭公虫，其丰度迅速飙升，这表明利用腐肉资源的机会窗口较窄，而像丽蝇蛹集金小蜂这样的物种，其丰度则逐渐变化，这表明资源利用窗口较宽。在以猪和人类尸体为食的物种之间也观察到了不同的丰度模式，这表明尸体类型是资源质量的一个重要方面。我们的研究结果表明，与物种出现情况不同，物种丰富度可以揭示有关物种对腐肉利用的更多细节，并提供有关资源质量如何驱动昆虫群落演替中的竞争和变化的信息。
