Yeeles Peter, Lach Lori, Hobbs Richard J, Didham Raphael K
School of Biological Sciences, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia, Australia.
College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University, Cairns, Queensland, Australia.
Nat Ecol Evol. 2025 May;9(5):779-788. doi: 10.1038/s41559-025-02690-y. Epub 2025 Apr 22.
Evidence is accumulating of declines in widespread, abundant insect species. The consequences of these losses for ecosystem functioning are predicted to be severe but remain poorly tested in real-world ecosystems. Here we tested the relative importance of functional redundancy versus complementarity in conferring stability of multifunctional performance in the face of dominant insect species decline. We conducted an experimental manipulation of functional trait-space occupancy within naturally occurring ant communities in Australia. Experimental suppression of dominant ant species in multiple trait groupings caused a counterintuitive increase in multifunctional performance, which was associated with an increase in species richness. The resident ant community had high functional redundancy, contributing to rapid compensatory dynamics following suppression. However, colonization by new species with increased trait complementarity drove higher multifunctional performance. This increased multifunctionality probably occurred via reduced interspecific competition but at the cost of increased sensitivity of ecosystem multifunctionality to further species loss. Our findings show that functional redundancy can buffer multifunctional performance of a community against decline of dominant insect species but suggest that future stability of ecosystem multifunctionality depends more on functional complementarity and altered competitive interactions.
越来越多的证据表明，广泛分布且数量众多的昆虫物种正在减少。这些损失对生态系统功能的影响预计会很严重，但在现实世界的生态系统中仍缺乏充分验证。在此，我们测试了功能冗余与互补性在面对优势昆虫物种减少时，对赋予多功能性能稳定性的相对重要性。我们对澳大利亚自然形成的蚂蚁群落中的功能性状空间占用情况进行了实验操作。在多个性状分组中对优势蚂蚁物种进行实验性抑制，导致多功能性能出现了与物种丰富度增加相关的、违反直觉的增长。当地蚂蚁群落具有较高的功能冗余度，这有助于在抑制后实现快速的补偿动态。然而，具有更高性状互补性的新物种的定殖推动了更高的多功能性能。这种多功能性的增加可能是通过减少种间竞争实现的，但代价是生态系统多功能性对进一步物种丧失的敏感性增加。我们的研究结果表明，功能冗余可以缓冲群落的多功能性能以应对优势昆虫物种的减少，但也表明生态系统多功能性未来的稳定性更多地取决于功能互补性和改变的竞争相互作用。
