Eva Cuesta

¿Conoces a los responsables de los estornudos del 30 % de la población mundial? ¿Qué tipo de bicho perseguido hasta la muerte está siendo clave en los estudios biomédicos? ¿Sabías que la revolución de la escritura en Occidente fue posible gracias a unas avispas con muchas agallas? ¿Has oído hablar de un fósil viviente con varios récords Guinness? ¿...

Dung removal by macrofauna such as dung beetles is an important process for nutrient cycling in pasturelands. Intensification of farming practices generally reduces species and functional diversity of terrestrial invertebrates, which may negatively affect ecosystem services. Here, we investigate the effects of cattle-grazing intensification on dung...

Aim: Aridity gradients are of great interest for understanding the responses of biodi-versity to water availability and water stress. However, little is known about the re-sponses of many animal groups, which are crucial for assessing the effects of climate change. Here, we study the effects of aridity on dung beetle communities, a group with well-...

Beetles are the most successful and diversified animal taxa characterized by the possession of an external pair of sclerotized wings (elytra). Managing electromagnetic radiations could be one of the functions of the exoskeleton. We studied the spectrophotometric response to ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared radiations of the elytra of seven c...

The seasonal and diel variations of dung beetle species were studied in an Iberian mid-mountain locality to examine the interaction between these two temporal rhythms. We assume that a seasonal variation in the diel activity would support the notion that both rhythms may assist in achieving a quick and flexible response when the climatic conditions...

1. Global warming may especially affect ectothermic insect species, making it necessary to forecast the capacity of these species to cope with climatic changes. 2. In this study, we use circular statistics to examine the seasonal plasticity of 32 dung beetle species in 17 localities of a mountain Iberian assemblage. We assume that the high variabil...

Background The exoskeleton of an insect could be an important factor in the success of its evolutionary process. This reaches its maximum expression in beetles, which constitute the most diversified animal taxon. The involvement in the management of environmental radiation could be one of the most important functions of the exoskeleton due to the p...

Knowing how recent environmental changes may have affected species diversity is a major objective to estimate the consequences of habitat alteration and climate change. In this study two dung beetle inventories made in the same locality of the Sierra de Guadarrama (Madrid, Spain) 34 years apart (1983–2017) are compared. Changes in diversity, specie...

Although Iberian subsurface terrestrial habitats have been sampled for a half century, they remain poorly known. During the last five years much more sampling of these subsurface habitats has been made, mainly in scree slopes (also called colluvial Mesovoid Shallow Substratum habitats, MSS) but also in alluvial debris of temporal watercourses (allu...

The mesovoid shallow substratum (MSS) of two areas in the Moncayo Massif (Zaragoza, Spain) was sampled for a year with subterranean pitfall traps installed at one meter depth in stony debris. Throughout this period, a large contingent of imagoes of Dima assoi Pérez Arcas 1872 (Elateridae) was found; this is a species whose genus is disjunctively di...

A new hypogean species of Trechus Clairville, Trechus arrecheai sp. nov., is described from the Iberian Peninsula. It was captured by subterranean pitfall traps in a non-calcareous Superficial Subterranean Habitat from the Moncayo Massif (Zaragoza, Spain). Data on the accompanying fauna are provided and the biogeographical implications of this disc...