Spider sociality and community assembly

是什么决定了动植物群落的组成，这是生态学的核心问题，但考虑到大多数系统的巨大空间规模和困难的操纵，这个问题很难解决。群居蜘蛛和在其网上定居的蜘蛛是在多个尺度上解决群落和元群落生态中的关键问题的易于处理的系统。 美洲各地的群居蜘蛛属群落在大陆尺度上表现出明显的环境过滤特征，在地方尺度上表现出有限的相似性。我们已经表明，环境过滤器反映了昆虫大小、降水强度和捕食风险的广泛尺度模式，这些模式将社会性和亚社会性物种的出现限制在特定的生境中。我们将测试资源划分以及环境和时间异质性在这些群落的生态位分化中的作用。我们假设，环境的异质性为身体大小或社会性水平不同的物种打开了不同的微生境，反过来，这些物种捕获的猎物的大小也不同。为了检验环境异质性和物种丰富度正相关的假设，我们将描述哥斯达黎加/巴拿马、厄瓜多尔和巴西的1-5个物种群落所占据的栖息地的特征。在选定的群落中，我们将进行相互的巢穴移植实验，以测试大多数功能不同的物种在给定的微生境中表现出最大性能差异的预测。 这些群居蜘蛛和其他蜘蛛的三维网络中有足够明显和稳定的Quililine节肢动物群落，可以作为元群落的模型。我们将调查当地和全球进程在确定这些社区的组成方面的相互作用。我们认为，作为宿主网络大小的函数的三维缩放与环境生产力相互作用，以确定资源流向宿主和调查人员。这些因素不仅会影响奎尼林的密度，还会影响它们的多样性。寄主蜘蛛的行为，如巢卫生，也可能影响某些类型的Quililine的发生率。为了验证这些假设，我们将评估在厄瓜多尔的海拔和降雨量梯度上奎尼兰群落的组成、宿主和奎尼兰之间的相互作用，以及资源流向宿主和奎尼兰的情况。通过人工建立新的寄主网络，我们将评估当地和空间过程在这些社区组成中的作用。 提出的项目寻求两个新的方向来解决社区组成的问题：认识到社会性水平在社区集合中的重要性，并将3D蜘蛛网中的Quiline社区用作元社区分析的新的经验系统。这两个易于处理的系统组成了一个强大的组合，在多个尺度上解决生态学的核心问题之一。

The question of what determines the composition of plant and animal communities is central to ecology, but one not easily addressed given the large spatial scales and difficult manipulation of most systems. Social spiders, and the inquilines that colonize their webs, are tractable systems to address key questions in community and metacommunity ecology at multiple scales. Communities of the social spider genus Anelosimus across the Americas exhibit the distinct signatures of environmental filtering at the continental scale and limiting similarity at the local scale. We have shown that the environmental filter reflects broad scale patterns of insect size, precipitation intensity and predation risk, which limit the occurrence of social and subsocial species to certain habitats. We will test the roles of resource partitioning and environmental and temporal heterogeneity in niche differentiation in these communities. We hypothesize that environmental heterogeneity opens up diverse microhabitats to species that differ in body size or level of sociality, which, in turn, differ in the size of prey they capture. To test the hypothesis that environmental heterogeneity and species richness are positively associated, we will characterize the habitats occupied by communities ranging from 1-5 species in Costa Rica/Panama, Ecuador, and Brazil. Within select communities, we will perform reciprocal nest transplant experiments to test the prediction that most functionally dissimilar species exhibit the greatest performance difference in a given microhabitat. The three-dimensional webs of these social and other spiders harbour inquiline arthropod communities of sufficient distinctness and stability to serve as models for metacommunities. We will investigate the interplay of local and global processes in determining the make up of these communities. We suggest that three-dimensional scaling as a function of host web size interacts with environmental productivity to determine flow of resources to hosts and inquilines. These factors may impact not only the density of inquilines, but also their diversity. Behaviours of the host spiders, such as nest hygiene, may also influence the incidence of certain inquiline types. To test these hypotheses we will assess the composition of inquiline communities, host-inquiline interactions, and flow of resources to hosts and inquilines across elevation and precipitation gradients in Ecuador. By artificially establishing new host webs we will assess the role of local and spatial processes in the make up of these communities. The proposed projects pursuit two novel directions to address the question of community compositionrecognizing the importance of level of sociality in community assembly and using the inquiline communities in 3D spider webs as a new empirical system for metacommunity analysis. These two tractable systems make for a powerful combination to tackle one of the central questions in ecology at multiple scales.