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Foraging traits modulate stingless bee community disassembly under forest loss.

Elinor M Lichtenberg^1,2, Chase D Mendenhall^3,4,5, Berry Brosi⁶

¹Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.

The Journal of Animal Ecology

|August 24, 2017

Summary

Land use change impacts tropical bee communities. Wide-diet stingless bees, vital pollinators, are displaced by dominant species in deforested areas, threatening pollination services.

Keywords:

Meliponini biodiversity community disassembly fourth-corner problem functional traits land use change pollination stingless bees

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Area of Science:

Ecology
Conservation Biology
Tropical Biology

Background:

Anthropogenic land use change significantly impacts biological communities and ecosystem services.
Pollination is a critical ecosystem service threatened by community disassembly, particularly in the tropics where land use change is rapid.
Understanding tropical bee community responses to land use change is limited, despite their vital role as pollinators.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how tropical, eusocial stingless bee (Apidae: Meliponini) communities change in response to forest loss.
To identify functional traits that influence the persistence of stingless bee species in deforested landscapes.
To explore the role of competitive interactions in stingless bee community disassembly.

Main Methods:

Compared functional traits of stingless bee species across pastures with varying forest cover in southern Costa Rica.
Utilized a trait-based approach to analyze community composition and species persistence.
Examined the relationship between foraging traits, nesting habits, and species presence in altered landscapes.

Main Results:

Stingless bee species with wider diet breadths were less likely to persist in areas with reduced forest cover.
Wide-diet-breadth species, often solitary foragers, were competitively subordinate to group-foraging species.
Traits such as ground-nesting or nesting in other species' nests correlated with persistence in deforested areas.
Community disassembly mechanisms in tropical bees differ from temperate regions, with competition playing a key regulatory role.

Conclusions:

Land use change, particularly deforestation, alters tropical bee community structure through mechanisms like interspecific competition.
Foraging traits and nesting strategies are crucial for stingless bee survival in human-modified tropical landscapes.
Conserving pollinator communities requires understanding trait-mediated responses and competitive dynamics under global change.