Abstract
Introduction
Land-use change has tremendous negative impacts on ecosystems that often assessed by using indicator taxa, such as dung beetles. Commonly, changes in dung beetle community attributes are used to evaluate habitat disturbance. Within species, changes in functional traits could also be informative, but are rarely used.
Aims/methods
Our goal was to evaluate whether intraspecific variation in beetle morphology could indicate habitat disturbance, and whether changes in morphology could be a better indicator than changes in abundance.
Beetles were collected in four major land uses: cerrado, eucalypt tree plantations, introduced cattle pastures, and soybean plantations. We focused on nine abundant paracoprid species. For each species in each land use, we estimated mean abundance and five morphological traits.
Results
Seven of the nine species showed intraspecific morphological differences due to land use, while five showed differences in abundance. All morphological traits showed effects of land-use change, but there was much variability in responses depending on species and land uses being compared.
Discussion
In dung beetles, intraspecific changes in phenotypically plastic morphological traits can be a more sensitive indicator of habitat disturbance than changes in abundance.
Implications for insect conservation
When using dung beetles as an indicator taxon, monitoring protocols could use morphological changes of a few focal species, thus avoiding massive lethal sampling which may oppose conservation goals. Also, because morphology is affected by land use, to obtain accurate results, studies using morphological traits to calculate functional community metrics, ought to use separate mean trait values for each habitat condition.
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Acknowledgements
RLC is supported by the researcher fellowship FAPESP (2022/07381-9). ALF thanks the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Financing code 001. We also thank CNPq-PELD (441225/2016-0 and 441142/2020-6) and FAPEMIG (APQ-04815-17 and APQ-03372-21) for funding this research.
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ALF, RLC and EA led the writing of the manuscript. RLC collected data in the field. ALF measured the morphological data. FM analyzed the data. All authors made contributions to the intellectual content, interpretation and editing of the manuscript.
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Franco, A.L., Carvalho, R.L., Andresen, E. et al. Dung beetle morphological traits show intraspecific differences among four land uses in the Cerrado biome. J Insect Conserv 27, 97–106 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-022-00452-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-022-00452-w