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Fuelling the biodiversity crisis: species loss of ground-dwelling forest ants in oil palm plantations in Sabah, Malaysia (Borneo)

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Abstract

Oil palm plantations today cover large areas of former tropical lowland rain forest in Southeast Asia and are rapidly expanding on the island of Borneo. Study of the community of ground-dwelling ants in different plantations in Sabah, Malaysia, over 2 years using tuna baiting, revealed that the oil palm plantation ground ant community was severely reduced in species richness in comparison to the forest interior, regardless of age, undergrowth cover, or proximity to neighbouring forest. The results indicate that oil palm plantation habitats, now covering more than 15% of Sabah’s land area, can sustain only about 5% of the ground-dwelling ant species of the forest interior. Nine of the 23 ant species baited in the plantations were never recorded inside forest. All numerically dominant ants were non-forest species. The most common species was Anoplolepis gracilipes, an invasive species present at 70% of all bait sites and known to cause ‘ecological meltdowns’ in other situations. The low frequency and species number of forest ground ants indicates that oil palm plantations act as effective dispersal barriers leading to community isolation in rain forest remnants. The replacement of natural forests with oil palm plantations poses a serious threat to the conservation of biodiversity on Borneo if similar results are confirmed in other taxa.

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Acknowledgments

We want to thank K. Eduard Linsenmair and Brigitte Fiala for discussions of many aspects of this research and Tobias Bickel for his help with tuna baits. We are also thankful to Chey Vun Khen, Arthur Chung, Robert Ong, Hubert Petol and Ruben Nilus of the Forest Research Center in Sandakan for all their support during our stay in Sabah. Permission to conduct research in Sabah was granted by the Economic Planning Unit, the Forestry Department Sabah and the Danum Valley Committee and is gratefully acknowledged. Three anonymous reviewers improved the quality of the paper. This study is project number DV163 of the Danum Valley Rainforest Research and Training Programme and was supported through a DAAD scholarship and DFG travel grant to CAB and by GTZ (TÖB) funding to TE.

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  1. Institute for Environmental Sciences, University Koblenz-Landau, Fortstr. 7, 76829, Landau, Germany

    Carsten A. Brühl

  2. Department of Neurobiology, Sensory Ecology Group, University of Düsseldorf, Universitätsstr. 1, 40225, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Thomas Eltz

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  1. Carsten A. Brühl
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Correspondence to Carsten A. Brühl.

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Brühl, C.A., Eltz, T. Fuelling the biodiversity crisis: species loss of ground-dwelling forest ants in oil palm plantations in Sabah, Malaysia (Borneo). Biodivers Conserv 19, 519–529 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-009-9596-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-009-9596-4

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