Laboratório de Ecologia da Polinização e Interações, LEPI, Departamento de Biodiversidade e Bioestatística, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade Estadual Paulista "Júlio de Mesquita Filho" (UNESP), Rua Prof. Dr. Antonio Celso Wagner Zanin, Botucatu, São Paulo, CEP 18618-689, Brazil.
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Biologia Vegetal, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade Estadual Paulista "Júlio de Mesquita Filho", Botucatu, São Paulo, CEP 18618-689, Brazil.
Oecologia. 2024 Mar;204(3):661-673. doi: 10.1007/s00442-024-05522-1. Epub 2024 Mar 6.
Indirect interactions are pivotal in the evolution of interacting species and the assembly of populations and communities. Nevertheless, despite recently being investigated in plant-animal mutualism at the community level, indirect interactions have not been studied in resource-mediated mutualisms involving plant individuals that share different animal species as partners within a population (i.e., individual-based networks). Here, we analyzed an individual-based ant-plant network to evaluate how resource properties affect indirect interaction patterns and how changes in indirect links leave imprints in the network across multiple levels of network organization. Using complementary analytical approaches, we described the patterns of indirect interactions at the micro-, meso-, and macro-scale. We predicted that plants offering intermediate levels of nectar quantity and quality interact with more diverse ant assemblages. The increased number of ant species would cause a higher potential for indirect interactions in all scales evaluated. We found that nectar properties modified patterns of indirect interactions of plant individuals that share mutualistic partners, leaving imprints across different network scales. To our knowledge, this is the first study tracking indirect interactions in multiple scales within an individual-based network. We show that functional traits of interacting species, such as nectar properties, may lead to changes in indirect interactions, which could be tracked across different levels of the network organization evaluated.
间接相互作用在相互作用物种的进化以及种群和群落的组装中起着关键作用。然而，尽管最近在植物-动物共生关系的群落水平上进行了研究，但在涉及个体植物的资源介导的共生关系中，尚未研究间接相互作用，这些关系涉及在种群内共享不同动物物种作为伙伴的个体植物（即基于个体的网络）。在这里，我们分析了一个基于个体的蚂蚁-植物网络，以评估资源特性如何影响间接相互作用模式，以及间接联系的变化如何在多个网络组织层次上在网络中留下痕迹。我们使用互补的分析方法，描述了微观、中观和宏观尺度上间接相互作用的模式。我们预测，提供中等水平花蜜数量和质量的植物与更多样化的蚂蚁群落相互作用。更多蚂蚁物种的数量将导致所有评估的尺度上更高的间接相互作用的可能性。我们发现，花蜜特性改变了共享互利伙伴的植物个体的间接相互作用模式，在不同的网络尺度上留下了痕迹。据我们所知，这是第一项在基于个体的网络中跟踪多个尺度间接相互作用的研究。我们表明，相互作用物种的功能特征，如花蜜特性，可能导致间接相互作用的变化，这些变化可以在评估的网络组织的不同层次上进行跟踪。
