Benoit Guénard

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Verified

Benoit verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• MSc, Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at The University of Hong Kong

Tropical regions are home to an exuberant diversity of insect species, which unfortunately remains poorly catalogued in most regions. Here, a checklist of aculeate wasps (Hymenoptera) is presented for Hong Kong, a territory of 1100 km2 located just below the Tropic of Cancer. To date, 350 species and morphospecies of aculeate wasps distributed acro...

An illustrated and annotated checklist of Hong Kong Aculeata wasps

1. Studies along broad spatial and habitat gradients evidence that organisms’ traits can influence community assembly through their impact on dispersal and environmental filtering. However, the role of traits in structuring local faunal communities within habitats remains poorly understood. In particular, the often-assumed role of traits in affecti...

The conservation of biodiversity represents a global challenge as the world experiences its sixth mass extinction. Understanding how conservation efforts are allocated is paramount to effectively protect threatened species. We analyzed ~14,600 conservation projects over a 25-y period, revealing substantial taxonomic biases in funding. When matched...

The production of species checklists is fundamental to setting baseline knowledge of biodiversity across the world and they are invaluable for global conservation efforts. The main objective of this study is to provide an up-to-date extensive checklist of the ants of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the largest country in sub-Saharan Africa,...

An extensive mosquito survey was carried out in Hong Kong from September to October 2022, employing a variety of collection methods. Specimens were identified using a combination of morphology and mitochondrial cytochrome C oxidase subunit 1 (COI) barcode sequences. Twenty-nine species, including three new records, i.e., Culex bicornutus (Theobald)...

Ants are well-known for their roles in ecosystem engineering and for providing multiple ecosystem services. In the past, these two roles have mainly been studied independently, and the possibility that these are two interchangeable roles just studied in different ways should be considered. In this review, we outline what is known of ant populations...

Climate change is a major threat to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, which can cause significant harm to its plant and animal species. We predicted the habitat distribution of Cataglyphis nodus (Brullé, 1833) in MENA using MaxEnt models under current and future climate conditions. Our analysis indicates that the cooler regions of the...

The ecological impact of non‐native species arises from their establishment in local assemblages. However, the rates of non‐native spread in new regions and their determinants have not been comprehensively studied. Here, we combined global databases documenting the occurrence of non‐native species and residence of non‐native birds, mammals, and vas...

Rare plant and vertebrate species have been documented to contribute disproportionately to the total morphological structure of species assemblages. These species often possess morphologically extreme traits and occupy the boundaries of morphological space. As rare species are at greater risk of extinction than more widely distributed species, huma...

On a global scale, biodiversity is geographically structured into regions of biotic similarity. Delineating these regions has been mostly targeted for tetrapods and plants, but those for hyperdiverse groups such as insects are relatively unknown. Insects may have higher biogeographic congruence with plants than tetrapods due to their tight ecologic...

Leptanillinae is an ant subfamily of low taxonomic diversity and limited distribution within the Old World. Species within this subfamily are hypogaeic and are notoriously difficult to find and collect. As a result of their rarity, comparatively little is known about their natural history and distributions. Based upon new sampling efforts, we prese...

Leptogenys is the most diverse genus of the ant subfamily Ponerinae and is widely distributed across the world’s tropical and subtropical regions. More than 40 species are known from the Oriental realm displaying a wide range of ecologies, although their life history traits remain poorly understood, and new species are frequently discovered. Here,...

On a global scale, biodiversity is geographically structured into regions of biotic similarity. Delineating these regions has been mostly targeted for tetrapods and plants, but those for hyperdiverse groups such as insects are relatively unknown. Insects may have higher biogeographic congruence with plants than tetrapods due to their tight ecologic...

The present corrigendum rectifies issues in Tang & Guénard (2023). https://doi.org/10.5852/ejt.2023.907.2327

The rapid decline of biodiversity is directly threatening the maintenance of important ecosystem processes. Yet, biodiversity loss is not homogeneous, with species presenting specific traits being more prone to extinction. Ultimately this can lead to potential disruption of key ecosystem functions. Ants are ubiquitous and abundant in all terrestria...

Ponera kohmoku is a species described in 1996 from Yaku-shima Island, and all known records to date have been limited to the southern portion of Japan. Here, new records of P. kohmoku are reported from Guangdong, Guangxi and Hong Kong in China, adding a fourth Ponera species to Hong Kong and Guangxi as well as the first nominal record of this genus...

The species of the ant genus Strumigenys Smith, 1860 from Southeast Asia are reviewed based on recent sampling efforts as well as unreported historical material from southern mainland China, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. We report 42 new species records for these regions. A total of 20 species new to science are described: S. anhdaoae sp. no...

Mutualism improves organismal fitness, but strong dependence on another species can also limit a species' ability to thrive in a new range if its partner is absent. We assembled a large, global dataset on mutualistic traits and species ranges to investigate how multiple plant–animal and plant–microbe mutualisms affect the spread of legumes and ants...

Biotic interactions play an important role in shaping species geographic distributions and diversity patterns. However, the role of mutualistic interactions in shaping global plant diversity patterns remains poorly understood, particularly with respect to interactions with invertebrates. It is unclear how the nature of different mutualisms interact...

The ant genus Temnothorax Mayr, 1861 (Myrmicinae, Crematogastrini) is diverse with 498 species described. Species are distributed predominately within the northern hemisphere with species richness decreasing closer to the tropics; contrary to other ant genera overall. In Southeast Asia, richness is relatively low and knowledge on the genus remains...

Under global warming, animal species show shrinking body size responses, cascading deep changes in community structure and ecosystem functions. Although the exact physiological mechanisms behind this phenomenon remain unsolved, smaller individuals may benefit from warming climate more than larger ones. Heat-coma, a physiological state with severe c...

Species of the ant genus Nylanderia constitute some of the most common ground dwelling Formicinae in tropical and subtropical areas. The genus includes numerous species introduced into new regions, especially within urban or disturbed environments. Here, we review the Nylanderia species found within Hong Kong and Macao, which are both highly urbani...

Dengue fever, a mosquito-borne fatal disease, brings a huge health burden in tropical regions. With global warming, rapid urbanization and the expansion of mosquitoes, dengue fever is expected to spread to many subtropical regions, leading to increased potential health risks on local populations. So far, limited studies assessed the dengue fever ri...

Cryptobiotic ants of the subfamily Amblyoponinae are notoriously difficult to collect and rarely addressed in faunal reviews. Database records are comparatively sparse with little literature regarding regional biogeography, and with most records associated with pristine natural habitats. We review the Amblyoponinae species of Hong Kong, a heavily u...

Early naturalists such as Humboldt observed that changes in topography and anthropogenic disturbances influenced vegetation structure and the composition of animal communities. This holistic view of community assembly continues to shape conservation and restoration strategies in an era of landscape degradation and biodiversity loss. Today, remote s...

Mutualism improves organismal fitness, but strong dependence on another species can also limit a species ability to thrive in a new range if its partner is absent. We assembled a large, global dataset on mutualistic traits and species ranges to investigate how multiple plant-animal and plant-microbe mutualisms affect the spread of legumes and ants...

While the regional distribution of non-native species is increasingly well documented for some taxa, global analyses of non-native species in local assemblages are still missing. Here, we use a worldwide collection of assemblages from five taxa - ants, birds, mammals, spiders and vascular plants - to assess whether the incidence, frequency and prop...

Background Understanding the interactions between bat flies and host bats offer us fundamental insights into the coevolutionary and ecological processes in host-parasite relationships. Here, we investigated the identities, host specificity, and patterns of host association of bat flies in a subtropical region in East Asia, which is an understudied...

Island systems are known to harbor disproportionate amounts of geographically restricted biodiversity and to experience high rates of species loss, and they ultimately represent critical systems with significant conservation values. However, knowledge of the biodiversity value of insular systems remains highly fragmented and incomplete for many gro...

Many alien species are neither cultivated nor traded but spread unintentionally, and their global movements, capacities to invade ecosystems, and susceptibility to detection by biosecurity measures are poorly known. We addressed these key knowledge gaps for ants, a ubiquitous group of stowaway and contaminant organisms that include some of the worl...

Aim Biogeographical regionalization is scant for most insect groups due to shortfalls in distribution and phylogenetic information, namely the Wallacean and Darwinian shortfalls respectively. Here, we focused on the European ants and compared new techniques to classical analyses based on regional lists and taxonomic methods. We asked the following:...

Understanding mechanistic processes driving biodiversity change in land‐use transformation is paramount but challenging. Functional trait‐based approach provides a framework to understand the environmental filtering process of species composition shifts. Yet, trait selection bias may affect the results on forecasting species dynamics, subsequent an...

Functional trait-based approaches have provided advances in the understanding of community assembly rules. Broad gen-eralisations remain, however, limited due to the idiosyncratic nature of taxa and ecosystems, especially in tropical regions. We use fine scale resolution (30 m grid) environmental variables and community surveys from nearly 100 seco...

The synthesis of comprehensive databases on the identity and distributions of alien organisms is a critical step to developing informed invasion management plans and identifying areas that are datadeficient. Here, we assembled all available records of alien ant distributions for Mexico, based on the literature, databases and unpublished data for a...

Knowledge on the distribution and abundance of organisms is fundamental to understanding their roles within ecosystems and their ecological importance for other taxa. Such knowledge is currently lacking for insects, which have long been regarded as the “little things that run the world”. Even for ubiquitous insects, such as ants, which are of treme...

In this study, we present a taxonomic update for the ant genus Myrmecina in China that includes 14 species in total. A recent survey of the leaf litter ant fauna in China’s Hengduan Mountains collected three unknown Myrmecina species, which we describe here as Myrmecina eowilsoni sp. nov., M. gaoligongensis sp. nov., and Myrmecina pierceae sp. nov....

Invertebrates constitute the majority of animal species and are critical for ecosystem functioning and services. Nonetheless, global invertebrate biodiversity patterns and their congruences with vertebrates remain largely unknown. We resolve the first high-resolution (~20-km) global diversity map for a major invertebrate clade, ants, using biodiver...

Despite a legacy of extensive deforestation, the 720 km2 city state of Singapore still harbours impressively diverse flora and fauna. Given increasing evidence of global insect declines, we urgently need to better document and protect local insect diversity. Numerous species of ants (Hymenoptera, Formicidae) have been recorded or described from Sin...

The assumption that differences in species' traits reflect their different niches has long influenced how ecologists infer processes from assemblage patterns. For instance, many assess the importance of environmental filtering versus classical limiting-similarity competition in driving biological invasions by examining whether invaders' traits are...

Tropical ecosystems are often biodiversity hotspots, and invertebrates represent the main underrepresented component of diversity in large‐scale analyses. This problem is partly related to the scarcity of data widely available to conduct these studies and the lack of systematic organization of knowledge about invertebrates' distributions in biodive...

Biotic interactions are known to play an important role in shaping species geographic distributions and diversity patterns. However, the role of mutualistic interactions in shaping global diversity patterns remains poorly quantified, particularly with respect to interactions with invertebrates. Moreover, it is unclear how the nature of different mu...

1.The decline of biodiversity is threatening important ecosystem processes, yet this decline is not homogeneous with species presenting specific traits being more prone to extinction, potentially leading to disruption of key ecosystem functions. Ants are ubiquitous and provide a plethora of ecosystem functions and thus are well suited for studies a...

Growing concern over rapid species declines and extinctions has led to considerable interest in the role of biodiversity for maintaining ecological processes. However, the loss of particular species has more pronounced effects on ecosystem services than others, highlighting the importance of key functional species traits and their relationships to...

Critical Thermal maximum (CTmax) is often used to characterize the upper thermal limits of organisms and represents a key trait for evaluating the fitness of ectotherms. The lack of standardization in CTmax assays has, however, introduced methodological problems in its measurement, which can lead to questionable estimates of species’ upper thermal...

Aim Biogeographic regionalization has fascinated biogeographers and ecologists for centuries and is endued with new vitality by evolutionary perspectives. However, progress is scant for most insect groups due to shortfalls in distribution and phylogenetic information, namely Wallacean and Darwinian shortfalls respectively. Here, we used the western...

Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids do not reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions occur and most terrestrial species reside. Here, we...

Biologists have long been fascinated by the processes that give rise to pheno-typic complexity of organisms, yet whether there exist geographical hotspots of phenotypic complexity remains poorly explored. Phenotypic complexity can be readily observed in ant colonies, which are superorganisms with morphologically differentiated queen and worker cast...

Biologists have long been fascinated by the processes that give rise to phenotypic complexity of organisms, yet whether there exist geographical hotspots of phenotypic complexity remains poorly explored. Phenotypic complexity can be readily observed in ant colonies, which are superorganisms with morphologically differentiated queen and worker caste...

Ants, an ecologically successful and numerically dominant group of animals, play key ecological roles as soil engineers, predators, nutrient recyclers, and regulators of plant growth and reproduction in most terrestrial ecosystems. Further, ants are widely used as bioindicators of the ecological impact of land use. We gathered information of ant sp...

The ecological and economic impacts of biological invasions are usually highly conspicuous, but these are the outcome of a global, multistage process that is obscured from view. For most taxa, we lack a large-scale picture of the movements of alien species, the biases and filters that promote or inhibit their spread at each stage, and blind spots i...

Most insects are morphologically and behaviourally adapted to a terrestrial lifestyle, and many species struggle if they fall onto the water surface. Yet, some terrestrial species exhibit an efficient aquatic locomotion ability that enables them to escape such perilous environments. Here, we perform a comparative study that investigates swimming be...

Background The world’s fast disappearing mangrove forests have low plant diversity and are often assumed to also have a species-poor insect fauna. We here compare the tropical arthropod fauna across a freshwater swamp and six different forest types (rain-, swamp, dry-coastal, urban, freshwater swamp, mangroves) based on 140,000 barcoded specimens b...

Secondary forest succession may restore microclimatic refugia for ectotherms and play a fundamental role in mitigating the combined effects of deforestation and climate warming on biodiversity; however, empirical evidence remains limited by short‐term, coarse‐scale, and solely taxonomic‐based approaches. We hypothesize that ant assemblage compositi...

One of the most general patterns in ecology is the positive relationship between environmental heterogeneity and local diversity. On the one hand, increased resource heterogeneity provides more resources for diverse consumers in the community. On the other hand, increased structural heterogeneity creates variation in the environment's physical stru...

Land use changes and accelerating deforestation rates impact biodiversity on a global scale. While it is well established that the loss of primary forests is devastating, considerably less is understood about the conservation value of sacred forests (e.g. Feng shui woods in China) as local biodiversity reservoirs in human influenced landscapes. Whe...

The continuous increase in urbanization has been perceived as a major threat for biodiversity, particularly within tropical regions. Urban areas, however, may still provide opportunities for conservation. In this study focused on Macao (China), one of the most densely populated regions on Earth, we used a comprehensive approach, targeting all the v...

Ants are continually introduced into regions outside of their natural biogeographic ranges via global trade. The genus Strumigenys Smith 1860 (Formicidae: Myrmicinae) are minute predators with a growing history of global introductions, although tropical introductions into temperate zones are rarely able to establish outside of heated infrastructure...

The synthesis of comprehensive databases on the identity and distributions of alien organisms is a critical step to developing informed invasion management plans and identifying areas that are data-deficient. Here, we assembled all available records of alien ant distributions for Mexico, based on the literature, databases and unpublished data for a...

Research in environmental science relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature at around 2 meter above ground1-3. These climatic grids however fail to reflect conditions near and below the soil surface, where critical ecosystem functions such as soil carbon storage are controlled and most biodiversity resides4-8...

Polyrhachis is one of the most taxonomically and ecologically diverse ant genera in the world. Limited knowledge is, however, available on the species encountered within continental South East Asia, contrasting with the extensive studies conducted on African and Indo-Australian species. Here a contribution of Polyrhachis species from Hong Kong and...

Insight into how species' phenotypic differences shape coexistence is key to understanding the processes structuring, maintaining and threatening biodiversity. In line with modern coexistence theory, increasing studies on plants show that traits may not only confer niche differences fostering the coexistence of dissimilar species, but also competit...

Interspecific competition, a dominant process structuring ecological communities, is influenced by species' phenotypic differences. Limiting similarity theory holds that species with similar traits should compete intensely (‘trait‐similarity'). In contrast, competing theories including modern coexistence theory emphasize that species with traits co...

We here compare the tropical arthropod fauna across a freshwater swamp and six different forest types (rain-, swamp, dry-coastal, urban, freshwater swamp, mangroves) based on 140,000 specimens belonging to ca. 8,500 species. Surprisingly, we find that mangroves, a globally imperiled habitat that had been expected to be species-poor for insects, are...

Upper thermal limit (UTL) is a key trait in evaluating ectotherm fitness. Critical Thermal maximum CT max , often used to characterize the UTL of an organism in laboratory setting, needs to be accurate to characterize this significant and field-relevant threshold. The lack of standardization in CT max assays has, however, introduce methodological p...

The wasp genus Psenulus is the most diverse genus of the family Psenidae in the superfamily Apoidea, with its diversity peaking in the Oriental realm. Six species of the genus are here recorded for the first time from the Hong Kong SAR. Three of these, Psenulus ephippius sp. nov., Psenulus gibbus sp. nov. and Psenulus pallens sp. nov. are described...

China’s Hengduan Mountain region has been considered one of the most diverse regions in the northern hemisphere. Its stunning topography with many deep valleys and impassable mountain barriers has promoted an astonishing diversification in many groups of organisms including plants, birds, mammals, and amphibians. However, the insect biodiversity in...

In the past few decades, sampling of leaf litter with Winkler extractors revealed how abundant and ubiquitous ants from the genus Strumigenys are. It is now known that this genus has the third greatest number of species within the Formicidae family. However, very few subterranean species are known, which may be due to the current under-sampling of...

An updated checklist of the ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) of Sri Lanka is presented. These include representatives of eleven of the 17 known extant subfamilies with 341 valid ant species in 79 genera. Lio-ponera longitarsus Mayr, 1879 is reported as a new species country record for Sri Lanka. Notes about type localities, depositories, and relevant...

Species delimitation offered by DNA-based approaches can provide important insights into the natural history and diversity of species, but the cogency of such processes is limited without multigene phylogenies. Recent attempts to barcode various Solenopsidini ant taxa (Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Myrmicinae), including the thief ant Solenopsis saudien...

Diets of species are crucial in determining how they influence food webs and community structures, and how their populations are regulated by different bottom‐up processes. Omnivores are able to adjust their diet flexibly according to environmental conditions, such that their impacts on food webs and communities, and the macronutrients constraining...

Protected areas are increasingly threatened by biological invasions, especially in tropical Asia where extensive areas of natural habitats have been converted to monoculture plantations. Such disturbance provides a gateway for exotic species invasions, highlighting an urgent need for cross‐boundary solutions to mitigate invasion impacts. Agroforest...

Understanding how organisms adapt to extreme environments is fundamental and can provide insightful case studies for both evolutionary biology and climate-change biology. Here, we take advantage of the vast diversity of lifestyles in ants to identify genomic signatures of adaptation to extreme habitats such as high altitude. We hypothesised two par...

Working definitions and brief accounts on the ecology, evolution and diversity of subterranean ants, an exciting frontier in myrmecology.

Aim Thermal physiology is commonly used in mechanistic models to predict species distribution and project distribution change. Such thermal constraints for ants are often measured under laboratory conditions as critical thermal limits (CTmax and CTmin), but have also been observed in the field as foraging thermal limits (FTmin and FTmax). Here we c...

Interspecific competition, a dominant process structuring ecological communities, acts on species' phenotypic differences. Species with similar traits should compete intensely (trait-similarity), while those with traits that confer competitive ability should outcompete others (trait-hierarchy). Either or both of these mechanisms may drive competiti...