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. 2023 Oct 26;8(1):24.
doi: 10.1186/s40850-023-00184-7.

Ecology, behavior and bionomics: functional response of Heterotermes tenuis Hagen (Insecta: Blattaria: Isoptera: Rhinotermitidae) in forests of the Colombian Orinoquía

Luis Ricardo Salazar-Salazar  1 , Olga Patricia Pinzón-Florian  2
Affiliations

Ecology, behavior and bionomics: functional response of Heterotermes tenuis Hagen (Insecta: Blattaria: Isoptera: Rhinotermitidae) in forests of the Colombian Orinoquía

Luis Ricardo Salazar-Salazar et al. BMC Zool. .

Abstract

Background: Land use intensification may affect diversity, abundance, and functional morphological traits (FMT) related to dispersal, food acquisition, digestion, and nesting in some insects, possibly impacting their ecological role. Most studies of termites on the effects of afforestation focus on diversity and abundance, but changes in FMT have yet to be studied.

Aim: To better understand the response mechanisms to land use intensification, we compared the FMT of the worker and soldier caste of Heterotermes tenuis among Pinus caribaea plantations of four different ages and gallery forests of the Colombian Orinoquía.

Methodology: We measured thirty-eight FMTs in the worker and soldier castes of H. tenuis from gallery forests and pine plantations. Then, we used a Community-Weighted Mean (CWM), a PERMANOVA, and a nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) to estimate the possible effect of land use type on the FMT of both castes. We selected the FMTs with the lowest intraspecific coefficient of variation (CV) from each caste to compare their size among the land use types and pine plantation ages.

Results: Land use type had a more significant impact on the FMT size of pine plantation workers than the age of the afforestation. FMT of the worker caste tends to be larger in gallery forests than in pine plantations, while the results were inconclusive for soldiers.

Conclusion: The results suggested a homogenization mainly of the feeding FMT of the worker caste of H. tenuis in pine plantations associated with the increase in the softwood food resource of P. caribaea.

Keywords: Environmental filters; Functional diversity; Homogenization; Traits functional.

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Conflict of interest statement

All the authors have read and approved the final manuscript and declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Location of the study area in Villanueva, Casanare, Colombia. The general geographical location of the sampling area. South America layer obtained from http://www.efrainmaps.es. Carlos Efraín Porto Tapiquén. Geografía, SIG y Cartografía Digital. Valencia, España, 2020 and Casanare layer from DANE Geoportal https://geoportal.dane.gov.co/geovisores/territorio/nivel-de-referencia-de-veredas/ (A). Sampling plot locations drawn on Google Earth images obtained using SAS Planet software http://www.sasgis.org/download/version May 19, 2023. White dots depict gallery forests, and blue dots pine plantations. PC1: 1–2 years old, PC2: 6–7 years old, PC3: 7–8 years old, PC4: 12–23 years old, G1 to G3: Gallery Forest (B)
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Worker dorsal view of the head at 50x (A), pronotum (B), prothoracic leg (C), and left mandible (D) and right mandible (E) at 60 × of a Heterotermes tenuis worker. Scale bars are 0,2 mm except for A and C, where it is 0,5 mm
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Minor soldier Dorsal view of the head at 50 × head (A), left mandible (B) and right mandible (C) at 60x, pronotum (D) and prothoracic leg (E) at 50 × of a Heterotermes tenuis minor soldier. Scale bars are 0.5 mm except for D, where it is 0.2 mm
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Morphological and functional traits of Heterotermes tenuis workers. Biplot of the type of land use as a descriptive variable. The ellipses represent groupings of individuals based on principal components
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Morphological traits of the soldier caste Heterotermes tenuis. The biplot of the principal component analysis uses the land use type as a descriptive variable. The ellipses represent groupings of individuals based on principal components
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
Nonmetric multidimensional ordination (NMDS) of the size of the FMT of the worker caste of Heterotermes tenuis in pine plantations of different ages and gallery forests. La: distance between the first apical tooth and the first marginal tooth, L1: distance between the first and second marginal tooth, L2: distance between the second and third marginal tooth, MPR: molar prominence, Ra = distance between the first apical tooth and the first marginal tooth, R1: distance between the first and second marginal teeth, R2 distance between the second marginal tooth and the molar plate, MP: molar plate. W2: Shape of the pronotum
Fig. 7
Fig. 7
Nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) ordination of the soldier caste of Heterotermes tenuis in pine plantations of different ages and gallery forests. ANC: width of the head, LCA: length of the head, LMI: maximum left mandible length, LMD: maximum right mandible length, APR: pronotum width, S2I: proportion of left mandible and head, S3: shape of the pronotum
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