Occurrence of blood-feeding terrestrial leeches (Haemadipsidae) in a degraded forest ecosystem and their potential as ecological indicators
Occurrence of blood-feeding terrestrial leeches (Haemadipsidae) in a degraded forest ecosystem and their potential as ecological indicators
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DOI：
10.1111/btp.12686
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发表时间：
2019-07-30
期刊：
影响因子：
2.1
通讯作者：
Rossiter, Stephen J.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Drinkwater, Rosie;Williamson, Joseph;Rossiter, Stephen J.
以血为食的无脊椎动物是生物多样性评估中的新兴模式类群，既是哺乳动物丰度的指标，也是用于鉴定的哺乳动物DNA的来源。其中，陆生水蚤可以说是最有希望的；它们在潮湿的热带地区大量存在，分布广泛，它们的血粉可以很容易地检测出来，以确定饮食。不幸的是，对陆生水蚤的研究还很少，对它们的生态和行为知之甚少。需要这些信息来评估它们作为生态指标的效用，并考虑到生境偏好可能引起的潜在抽样偏差。通过占居模拟和耐热性分析相结合的方法，我们确定了东南亚热带森林中广泛分布的相关陆生褐毛虫(Haemadipsa Sumatrana)和老虎水蚤(Haemadipsa Picta)物种发生的影响因素。我们在婆罗洲沙巴州退化的森林景观中，在雨季和旱季对这两种物种进行了采样，将发生情况与栖息地水平的指标联系起来。我们发现，对于这两个物种，检测概率随着冠层高度的增加而增加，而不受季节的影响。此外，植被异质性的增加对旱季褐水蚤的发生有很强的负面影响，这表明植被结构与气候之间存在交互作用。然而，我们发现这两个物种在生理耐热性(CTMAX)方面没有差异。最后，使用简化的数据集，我们发现在包括哺乳动物丰度的情况下，棕色水蚤模型的拟合度略有改进。我们的结果表明，陆生水蚤的存在可以作为栖息地质量和潜在哺乳动物丰度的有用生态指标。在印度尼西亚，可以通过在线材料获得。
Blood-feeding invertebrates are emerging model taxa in biodiversity assessments, both as indicators of mammal abundance and also as sources of mammal DNA for identification. Among these, terrestrial leeches arguably offer the greatest promise; they are abundant and widespread in the humid tropics, and their blood meals can be easily assayed to establish diet. Unfortunately, terrestrial leeches are understudied, with little known about their ecology and behavior. Such information is needed to evaluate their utility as ecological indicators and to account for potential sampling biases that might arise from habitat preferences. By combining occupancy modeling and thermal tolerance assays, we determined the factors affecting species occurrence in the related terrestrial brown (Haemadipsa sumatrana) and tiger leech (Haemadipsa picta), both of which are widespread in tropical forests in Southeast Asia. We sampled both species across a degraded forest landscape in Sabah, Borneo, in wet and dry seasons, associating occurrence with habitat-level metrics. We found that, for both species, detection probability increased with canopy height regardless of season. Additionally, increased vegetation heterogeneity had a strong negative influence on brown leech occurrence in the dry season, implying an interaction between vegetation structure and climate. However, we found no difference in physiological thermal tolerance (CTMAX) between the two species. Finally, using a reduced dataset, we found a small improvement in brown leech model fit when including mammal abundance. Our results suggest that the presence of terrestrial leeches may act as useful ecological indicators of habitat quality and potentially mammalian abundance. in Indonesia is available with online material.