Keywords :
ecological function,
Eucalyptus,
food web,
predator,
restoration,
trait.
บทคัดย่อ :
Immense effort has been devoted to mitigating the
negative effect of deforestation, one of the main
factors causing global change. However, the effect of
reforestation management on food-webs has been
rarely studied and no study so far has investigated
the effect on predator-prey interactions in forest
understories. We studied predator-prey interactions
in forest understories using web-building spiders in
four forest types: dry evergreen forest representing a
natural control and three 20-30-year-old reforesta-
tion types, namely secondary naturally regenerating
dry evergreen forest, monoculture reforestation
dominated by Eucalyptus camaldulensis, and mixture
reforestation dominated by Acacia mangium and E.
camaldulensis. We collected spiders with their prey
and measured the availability of potential prey. We
also measured different spider traits (web type, body
size) that can be selected by various forest types and
consequently affect the predator-prey interactions.
The forest type influenced the predator-prey inter-
action in a complex way, interactively affecting spi-
der density and prey-specific capture efficacy of
spider community. The forest type also influenced
the web-type and body-size distributions of spiders.
Surprisingly, the prey composition caught by spider
webs was related only to the web-type but not to the
spider mean body size. None of the studied refor-
estations have yet restored the natural predator-
prey interactions, which indicates that conservation
management in the tropics should focus on estab-
lishing protected areas in pristine regions instead of
relying on reforestation. Moreover, the food-web
models need to incorporate not only body sizes but
also hunting strategies of predators to improve their
predictive abilities.
เอกสารอ้างอิง :
Michalko, R., Kosulic, O., Wongprom, P., Songsangchote, C., Saksongmuang, V. and Trisurat, Y., 2021. Reforestations of tropical forests alter interactions between web-building spiders and their prey. Ecosystems, pp.1-14.
