Flávio CamarotaFederal University of Minas Gerais | UFMG
Flávio Camarota
Phd
About
33
Publications
6,418
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259
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Flávio does research in Entomology and Ecology. He is currently working on the ecology of arboreal ant assemblies, with emphasis on mechanisms of species coexistence.
Additional affiliations
January 2010 - present
January 2010 - May 2016
Publications
Publications (33)
Urban environments are characterized by profound differences in abiotic conditions compared to natural environments , which filter one part of the biotic communities that endure living in these environments. A conspicuous element in many cities are scattered trees, often included in urban planning around the world. These trees are key elements for...
There is often a vertical stratification of the vegetation in tropical forests, where each forest stratum has a unique set of environmental conditions, including marked differences in habitat heterogeneity, physical complexity, and microclimate. Additionally, many tropical forests are highly seasonal, and we need to consider the temporal variation...
1. Despite the recent advances regarding the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of ant-trophobiont mutualistic interactions, understanding their spatial variation remains a challenge. An approach involving species interaction networks is a helpful tool to overcome it because it allows us to compare how different species interact among them. 2. He...
Insect pollinators, including bees and wasps, are facing a marked decline in their native populations, caused mainly by human activities, such as forest fragmentation, urbanization, and the use of agrochemicals. To help mitigate the rapid decline of pollinators, new efforts towards understanding basic and applied aspects of these organisms are nece...
Parasitic plants are important sources of stress and can strongly impact their host plants through direct and indirect associations with other herbivores and their associated organisms. In the tropics, mistletoes are frequent parasitic plants, influencing different trophic levels involved with the host plant. Here, we investigated the direct and in...
Disturbances are key events in ecological systems, strongly impacting biological communities. This study disentangles the effects of a chronic (flood) and acute (fire) disturbance to determine their interactive effects on ant species richness and composition at different temporal scales. For this, we sampled ground-dwelling ants with pitfall traps...
An understanding of the spatiotemporal patterns of species distribution is a major goal in community ecology. This understanding is particularly challenging for highly seasonal and diverse habitats, such as transition zones between major biomes, like the Cerrado-Amazon transition (CAT). Within the CAT, there are many kinds of vegetation, including...
Ants are among the most abundant organisms on Earth, being adapted for living on different solid surfaces. However, in some habitats, like riparian forests and flooded plains, water can be a constant obstacle, and overcoming this obstacle can be essential to determine the persistence of ants in such habitats. While most ant species avoid the water...
Fire-suppression is of concern in fire-prone ecosystems because it can result in the loss of endemic species. Suppressing fires also causes a build-up of flammable biomass, increasing the risk of severe fires. Using a Before-After, Control-Impacted design, we assessed the consequences of high-severity fires on Neotropical savanna arboreal ant commu...
Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain the coexistence of ants sharing similar food resources, including ecological trade-offs, however, these hypotheses have mostly been tested in ground-dwelling ant communities. For instance, the discovery-dominance trade-off hypothesis states that species with overlapping food resources differ in their ab...
Wood-boring beetle larvae act as ecosystem engineers by creating stem cavities that are used secondarily as nests by many arboreal ant species. Understanding the heterogeneity and distribution of available cavities and their use by ants is therefore key to understanding arboreal ant community assembly and diversity. Our goals were to quantify the a...
Territoriality is costly, and the accurate identification of intruders and the decision to perform aggressive responses are key behavioral traits in social animals. We studied aggression among individuals belonging to close and distant nests of the plant-ant Azteca muelleri, which lives in stems of the pioneer tree Cecropia glaziovii. More specific...
1. The trophic ecology of organisms is often mediated by habitat characteristics. Ants are key organisms of most food webs, and their diet can be plastic depending on the relative availability of different nutrients.
2. Using stable isotope analysis, we investigated whether there were differences in the trophic position (δ¹⁵N) and/or in the relativ...
The majority of tropical arboreal ant species nest in tree cavities. These cavities, often produced initially by wood‐boring beetles, can be in live or dead wood and represent long‐lasting and highly defensible nesting resources. Yet the size of cavity entrances can constrain their use. Active entrance modification may be an effective way to overco...
Urban environments are under a high degree of human disturbance, which profoundly changes their abiotic characteristics, affecting the biotic communities. A conspicuous element in cities are scattered trees, often included in urban planning around the world. These trees are key elements for urban ecological processes and services and act as islands...
en Ants are diverse and ecologically important organisms in tropical forests, where their spatiotemporal distribution can be highly complex. This complexity arises mainly from marked differences in microclimatic conditions and resource availability through space and time that is even more evident in highly seasonal environments, such as tropical dr...
Ecologically dominant species can shape the assembly of ecological communities via altering competitive outcomes. Moreover , these effects may be amplified under limited niche differentiation. Nevertheless, the influences of ecological dominance and niche differentiation on assembly are rarely considered together. Here, we provide a novel examinati...
Physical disturbances, such as fire, may affect the relationship between ants and plants. We evaluated the extent to which severe fires alter the protective effect of ants against the herbivores of an extrafloral-nectary bearing tree. We performed an ant removal experiment and sampled the ant fauna from the same trees over 4 years: the pre-fire yea...
The strength of plant-animal diversity relationships tends to be idiosyncratic and, in many cases, its mechanisms are poorly understood. Consequently, the relevance of plant diversity patterns as surrogates of animal diversity patterns is still debated. We evaluated if ants and trees show congruent patterns of species richness and turnover at a reg...
Predicting the outcomes of any mutualistic interaction between ants and plants can be a very difficult task, since these outcomes are often determined by the ecological context in which the interacting species are embedded. Network theory has been an important tool to improve our understanding about the organizational patterns of animal–plant inter...
Interspecific trade-offs in foraging strategies can facilitate species coexistence in diverse communities with overlapping resource
use, especially in taxa with complex social-foraging strategies. The discovery-dominance trade-off hypothesis is often invoked to
help explain coexistence of ant species that use overlapping food resources, wherein col...
A major goal of community ecology is to identify the patterns of species associations and the processes that shape them. Arboreal ants are extremely diverse and abundant, making them an interesting and valuable group for tackling this issue. Numerous studies have used observational data of species co-occurrence patterns to infer underlying assembly...
The outcome of any interspecific interaction is often determined by the ecological context in which the interacting species are embedded. Plant ontogeny may represent an important source of variation in the outcome of ant-plant mutualisms, as the level of investment in ant rewards, in alternative (non-biotic) defenses, or both, may be modulated by...
How environmental contexts shape the strength of species interactions, and their influence on community structure, remains a key focus for the field of community ecology. In particular, the extent to which local competitive interactions impact community structure, and whether this differs across contexts, persists as a general issue that is unresol...
As formigas estão entre os principais organismos terrestres, com grande variação morfológica e comportamental, e fazem parte de diversos processos e interações ecológicas, que compreendem desde a predação e competição com outros organismos até as relações mutualistas com plantas e outros artrópodes (HÖLLDOBLER e WILSON, 1990). Podem representar de...
Background/Question/Methods
Understanding the extent to which species interactions mechanistically shape ecological communities remains a central challenge to the field of community ecology. Much of the work on this issue has focused on competitive interactions, while the role of other types of ecological interactions have been studied far less. “...
Background/Question/Methods
A central goal of the field of evolutionary ecology is to understand the evolutionary relationships between resource use and the diversification of functionally-related phenotypic traits. “Ecosystem engineers” are organisms that produce persistent physical state changes in the environment, which serve secondarily as re...
Background/Question/Methods
A crucial step for understanding the impact of ecosystem engineers on community structure is to quantify the abundance and distribution of the resources they produce. In Brazilian cerrado (savannah) trees, stem-boring beetles act as ecosystem engineers by creating cavities in branches that are subsequently occupied by...
In this study we describe trophobiosis between ants and Eurystethus microlobatus (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae) at a highland quartzite rocky outcrop in southern Espinhaco Range, southeastern Brazil. We found stinkbugs exclusively on the mistletoe Psittacanthus robustus (Loranthaceae). The stinkbug species is gregarious, forming dense clusters, with fem...
Projects
Projects (2)
Ongoing projects in my lab address a broad range of questions related to adaptive radiation in lineages with complex social phenotypes. Our empirical work is with the turtle ants (genus Cephalotes), a species-rich group with exceptional morphological diversity.
This project has the following objectives:
1) perform a scientometric evaluation of the studies related to fire in the Cerrado biome, seeking to understand the temporal and spatial trends in publications about this theme.
2) understand the interference of both fire and seasonal floods in the ant diversity of Pantanal wetland.
3) assess the interference of fire on the diversity patterns of litter and arboreal ants in the Cerrado.
4) estimate the effects of different types of fire in the colonization rates of artificial nests by ants.
5) measure the differential effects of both seasonality and kinds of fire in the interactions between ants and plant with and without EFNs.
6) evaluate the effect of different types of fire on ant species performances at food resources.
