Abstract
When trying to assess entomological diversity, identifying taxa at levels higher than species is much easier and may provide a wider vision of other ecological features. In this work, we used the data from several samplings made in across six cacao farms in Mérida state (Venezuela). Farms fell into two categories according to intensity of perturbation. In these samplings we identified all parasitoid Hymenoptera families. All individuals belonging to families Ichneumonidae, Braconidae and Chalcididae were sorted to subfamilies and then to morphospecies. The accuracy of subfamilies richness to predict the species richness and to detect differences in the conservation status of plantations was tested. The species aggregation according to the sampling size was also explored. The three families this study was focused on represented 23 % of the total sampling, comprising 40 subfamilies and 393 morphospecies. Results showed a significant high positive correlation between subfamilies and species richness, and species/subfamilies ratio was about 4.5:1, with logarithmic relationship with sampling size tending to stabilisation at sizes greater than 15 individuals per sampling day. Subfamily richness detected the nearly-significant differences in plantations with the same accuracy as species richness, and therefore surrogacy effectiveness of parasitoid Hymenoptera subfamilies richness may be accepted for cacao plantations.
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Acknowledgments
I want to express my gratitude to N. Gutiérrez and D. Sánchez for their kind help during the fieldwork. Also, I am indebted to Cooperativa Río Perdido Medio, especially to A. Parra, for allowing me to work in their farms. Lastly, my grateful appreciation to E. Frago, G. Sánchez-Rojas and three anonymous referees for their valuable comments to the manuscript. This research was supported by Fundacite-Mérida, within the project Red Socialista de Innovación Productiva (RSIP) en Cacao del Municipio Obispo Ramos de Lora, funded by the Ministerio del Poder Popular para Educación Universitaria, Ciencia y Tecnología of Gobierno Bolivariano de Venezuela.
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Communicated by Dirk Sven Schmeller.
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Mazón, M. Taking shortcuts to measure species diversity: parasitoid Hymenoptera subfamilies as surrogates of species richness. Biodivers Conserv 25, 67–76 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-015-1029-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-015-1029-y