Given the high diversity of dung beetles, and the growing interest in this group, several candidates will probably be found in most tropical countries.ĭung beetles are important components of most terrestrial ecosystems. We strongly recommend the development of similar protocols for the analysis of other potential ecological indicator species, drawing information from historical and contemporary sources and exploiting the available statistical tools to reveal complex patterns. festivum requires the analysis of its relationships to other species.
festivum seems to be sensitive to changes in vegetation cover, but tolerant to certain levels of perturbance, where it probably replaces other, more sensitive species. It was strongly associated with forest vegetation, but abundance, biomass and body size increased under harsher (hotter and drier) cli- matic conditions. festivum population status could not be completely explained by historical or current conditions alone, but rather by combinations of both. Our approach consisted of two steps: estimating habitat suit- ability (HS) from historical records and mean environmental conditions, and analysing four different properties measured during a nationwide survey (occurrence, total abundance, individual body size, and total biomass), in relationship with HS and current environmental covariates measured from remote sensors. We analysed data from a nation-wide dung beetle survey in Venezuela in order to assess the indicative response of Oxysternon festivum (Coleoptera: Scarabaeinae) to veg- etation and climatic condition in the Orinoco river basin. Dung beetle species with different sets of ecological traits may differ in their dispersal ability, so we suggest a new minimum distance of 100 m between pairs of traps to minimize interference between baited pitfall traps for sampling copronecrophagous Scarabaeinae dung beetles.Ī good indicator species should be easy to sample, identify and measure, and be informative about its ecological context. Our results suggest that, based on the analyses of the whole community or the species with the highest number of recaptured individuals, the minimum distance of 50 m between pairs of baited pitfall traps proposed roughly 10 years ago is inadequate. Large-diurnal-tunneler species showed greater mobility than did both large-nocturnal tunneler and roller species. We found differences in mean movement rate between Scarabaeinae species, and between species with different sets of ecological traits.
We investigated the mobility of dung beetles using mark-release-recapture technique, and tested the usefulness of the current recommendation for interaction distance between baited pitfall traps in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Understanding the dispersal process is of great interest in ecology because it is related to several mechanisms driving community structure. A primary goal of community ecologists is to understand the processes underlying the spatiotemporal patterns of species distribution.
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