Ecological communities are collections of species bound together by their influences on one another. Community structure, therefore, refers to the way in which these influences are organised. As a result, ecologists are mainly interested in the factors driving the structure, functioning, and persistence of communities. The traditional focus, however, has been on the feeding relationships among species (direct trophic interactions), whereas relationships mediated by a third species or the environment (indirect interactions) have been largely overlooked. I investigated the role of indirect interactions in structuring communities through a series of field experiments in a diverse assemblage of arthropods living on a Brazilian shrub species. I experimentally reduced the abundance of the commonest galler on the shrub and found that the perturbation resonated across the food web, affecting its structure and robustness. Since there was no potential for these effects to be propagated directly or indirectly via the documented trophic links, the effects must have spread non-trophically and/or through trophic links not included in the web. Thus, I investigated non-trophic propagation of effects in the system. I demonstrate that hatched galls of the commonest galler, which serve as habitat for other species, can mediate non-trophic interactions that feedback to the galler modifying its interactions with parasitoids and inquiline aphids. I performed further manipulative experiments, excluding ants, live galls and hatched galls, to reveal mechanisms for the non-trophic interaction modifications observed in this system. Finally, I explored how non-trophic interaction modification could affect the structure and stability of a discrete ecological community in the field. I investigated how the densities of certain pairs of groups relate to each other, and how their relationship changes in relation to a third group. Then, I assembled an "effect network" revealing, for the first time in an empirical community, a hidden web of non-trophic indirect interactions modifying the direct interactions and modifying each other. Overall, the thesis presents evidence that communities are strongly interconnected through non-trophic indirect interactions. This is one of the first empirical demonstrations of the context-dependent modification of interactions via non-trophic interactions. However, determining the mechanisms behind such interaction modifications may be unfeasible. Understanding how the observed effects relate to community structuring requires shifting our focus from bipartite interaction networks to a more holistic approach.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:729950 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | da Silva, Milton Barbosa |
| Contributors | Morris, Rebecca ; Lewis, Owen |
| Publisher | University of Oxford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4a093748-6192-4bbc-bf0f-854e909b47c0 |
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