Gilbert Barrantes

Gilbert Barrantes
University of Costa Rica | UCR · Escuela de Biología

Ph. D.

About

134
Publications
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1,432
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Publications

Publications (134)
Article
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Esta investigación presenta una propuesta de educación ambiental bajo la modalidad de maleta didáctica, que consiste en un compendio de 12 actividades lúdico-didácticas originales, dirigidas a estudiantes de primaria que se encuentran en la etapa de operaciones concretas definida por Piaget. Las actividades se encuentran circunscritas en el context...
Preprint
Urbanization alters ecosystems, fragmenting natural habitats, and hence, increasing isolation between populations. Therefore, a reduction in gene flow among isolated populations is expected with greater distance and time since fragmentation. Changes in the structure, density, or community composition in the remaining habitats often result in specie...
Article
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Many plant species in high montane ecosystems rely on animal pollination for sexual reproduction, however, our understanding of plant-pollinator interactions in tropical montane habitats is still limited. We compared species diversity and composition of blooming plants and floral visitors, and the structure of plant-floral visitor networks between...
Article
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Males of the Strawberry Poison Frog (Oophaga pumilio) use acoustic signals during courtship and territorial interactions. In these contexts, spectro-temporal characteristics of the calls provide information on body size, territory quality, and dominance to conspecifics. Previous research on this species has associated low-rate territorial calls pro...
Article
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Introducción: La acuacultura de truchas ha incrementado gradualmente en las tierras altas de Costa Rica. Las aguas residuales de esta actividad son descartadas directamente en los ríos, sin tratamientos previos. Como consecuencia, la actividad truchícola puede contaminar severamente el agua de los ríos con bacterias que pueden afectar la salud huma...
Article
Urban bird dwellers survive and reproduce in highly urbanized ecosystems. Some individuals adjust to these novel conditions by changing natural nesting materials for artificial materials, thus making nests more conspicuous in the environment. The consequences of using artificial materials for nesting remain poorly understood, especially from a nest...
Article
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The Costa Rican highlands are considered hotspots of diversity and endemism, but studies on rodents are scarce. We compared the richness and abundance of mice between the montane forest and the paramo at the summit of the Talamanca mountain range. We selected two study sites within the Talamanca mountain range: the Cerro de la Muerte Biological Sta...
Article
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The Costa Rican Paramo is a unique ecosystem with high levels of endemism that is geographically isolated from the Andean Paramos. Paramo ecosystems occur above Montane Forests, below the permanent snow level, and their vegetation differs notably from that of adjacent Montane Forests. We compared the composition and beta diversity of blooming plant...
Article
Because studies of plumage coloration often focus on highly elaborate and conspicuous males, little is known about the factors driving the evolution of drab plumage in females of dichromatic species. We explored variation in the color properties of drab female plumage across subspecies of the Variable Seedeater (Sporophila corvina), and found a cor...
Article
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The highly diverse Polysphincta genus group includes a large number of species whose host spider is unknown. Here, we describe the first record of a species of Acrotaphus parasitizing an araneid in the genus Acanthepeira, in this case a subadult male. The cocoon web that the male spider constructed, induced by the third instar wasp larva, consisted...
Article
Courtship and copulation behaviours are yet scantily described in many spider families, and this lack of information limits our understanding of the evolution of such behaviours within and across families. Here, we provide a detailed description of both courtship and copulation behaviour for Oecobius concinnus Simon, 1893. A striking characteristic...
Article
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Identifying the source population of alien species is important to assess the distribution and potential effects in the invaded area. The araneid spider Cyrtophora citricola is widely distributed in Europe, Asia, and Africa; however, in the last 26 years, it has been reported in several countries across the Americas. To date, the geographic origin...
Article
Male and female genital morphology may have strong effects on fitness in spiders. Females of some species of Leucauge produce mating plugs that partially or totally block the entrances to their insemination ducts on the epigynum, forming barriers that reduce the probabilities of future inseminations. While in some species both females and males par...
Article
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Gene flow in birds can be affected by urbanization depending on natural history traits and adaptability to habitat change. Contrasting results can be expected when comparing species with opposite resilience to urbanization. In this study, we assessed genetic diversity and structure for two bird species, the urban avoider white-eared ground-sparrow,...
Article
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Species recognition and reproductive isolation are critical for organisms to prevent expensive and unsuccessful matings. This may be particularly important in closely related species that coexist synchronously in the same habitat, and for which reproductive barriers are not entirely effective. Tetragnatha argentinensis Mello-Leitão, 1931 and T. nit...
Article
Urban development reduces the abundance of most natural resources for some birds but also provides new opportunities for others. One group that is more likely affected by urban development is the cavity-nesting species (primary excavators and cavity-adopters), because the main substrates used for nesting, such as dead trees or dirt banks, are frequ...
Article
Behavior is often phylogenetically informative and detailed descriptions of behavior have been used to support taxonomic relationships in several groups, such as birds, lizards, and arthropods. Web building behavior has provided informative traits to several spider families, but observations are lacking for other families, such as wall spiders Oeco...
Article
The design of orb webs is affected by multiple abiotic (e.g., wind, available space), biotic (e.g., prey availability, predation), and species specific (e.g., spider size) factors. Thus, some features of each spider web are expected to reflect the combined effect of such factors. We compared the relationship of spider size and web inclination on th...
Preprint
Full-text available
Gene flow in birds can be affected by urbanization depending on natural history traits and adaptability to habitat change. Contrasting results can be expected when comparing species with opposite resilience to urbanization. In this study, we assessed genetic diversity and structure for two bird species, the urban avoider white-eared ground-sparrow,...
Article
Full-text available
The advance of urbanization in Neotropical countries has drastically changed or eliminated extensive areas of natural habitats. Despite these changes, some species breed in cities and adapt to urban conditions. Several variables, such as the type of nest, substrate, and height, as well as the distance to buildings at which nests are constructed, ma...
Article
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The brains of smaller animals are smaller than those of their larger relatives, but it is not clear whether their adaptive behavioral flexibility is more limited. Previous interspecific comparisons found that aspects of web construction behavior of very small orb weaving spiders (0.005 mg) were no less precise than those of much larger related orb...
Article
The internal temperature of nests largely depends on the materials used in their construction because the characteristics of each material affect the isolation of nest walls. In urban environments, the availability of natural materials for nest building decreases, while the availability of artificial materials increases. Therefore, many urban bird...
Preprint
Full-text available
Identifying the source population of invasive species is important to assess the distribution and potential effects in the invaded area. The araneid spider Cyrtophora citricola is widely distributed in Europe, Asia, and Africa; however, in the last twenty years, it has been reported in several countries across the Americas. To date, the geographic...
Article
Noise affects the recognition of acoustic signals by masking information. To compensate for increased noise, individuals often increase the minimum frequency of their vocalization to reduce noise interference. Our goal was to analyze the effect of noise on the characteristics of different bird vocalizations, through a comparative study of vocalizat...
Article
Many orb-weaving spiders break the central lines of the hub at the end of web construction. Nevertheless, very little is known of how spiders break these lines and whether this behaviour differs among taxa. Here, we describe details of how Leucauge mariana (Taczanowski, 1981) breaks the central lines of the hub. Breaking hub lines varies among indi...
Article
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Strawberry Poison Frogs (Oophaga pumilio) are common members of leaf litter lowland communities in Central America and exhibit several color morphs throughout their distribution. Color plays a determinant role during intra-and intermorph interactions in many insular populations, but little is known about the variation and perception of visual signa...
Article
Acoustic signals are distorted by vegetation, wind currents, or other sounds when transmitted through the environment. Consequently, vocalizations with features that optimize sound transmission or behaviors that improve the efficacy of communication have evolved in many animal species. Among behavioral strategies, some species call from perches abo...
Article
The ratio of brain size to body size (relative brain size) is often used as a measure of relative investment in the brain in ecological and evolutionary studies on a wide range of animal groups. In birds, a variety of methods have been used to measure the brain size part of this ratio, including endocranial volume, fixed brain mass, and fresh brain...
Article
Anthropogenic noise (≤ 3 kHz) can affect key features of birds’ acoustic communication via two different processes: (1) song‐learning, because songbirds need to hear themselves and other birds to crystallize their song, and (2) avoidance of song elements that overlap with anthropogenic noise. In this study we tested whether anthropogenic noise redu...
Article
Male courtship signals often stimulate female sense organs whose sensitivities originally evolved under natural selection. In classic female choice models of sexual selection, females can benefit from increasing their sensitivity and responsiveness to male stimuli; but in sexually antagonistic models, increased female sensitivity or responsiveness...
Article
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Conspecific negative density dependence (CNDD) is one of the main mechanisms influencing diversity maintenance in tropical forests. Tropical highland forests, in contrast to most lowland forests, are commonly dominated by a few tree species, and testing the importance of density dependence effects on seedling establishment of dominant trees may pro...
Article
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Large part of the morphological diversity observed across taxa is attributed to the effect of sexual selection; and the static allometry of these structures vary largely from highly positive to negative, depending on their function, and position on the animal's body. In arthropods, information of how sexually selected contact and reaching male stru...
Article
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Black plumage is expected to absorb and retain more heat and provide better protection against UV radiation compared with lighter plumages. Black plumage is common in species of the genera Turdus and Platycichla that inhabit highlands across different regions of the world. Considering this geographical recurrent pattern we tested the hypothesis tha...
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The koinobiont ectoparasitoids of spiders in the Polysphincta genus group are divided into two well-supported clades. Species in one clade parasitize spiders in the higher araneoid group, and the behaviour of these ectoparasitoids and the parasitized host spiders is relatively well known. On the contrary, wasp species in the other clade parasitize...
Article
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Conservation efforts in terrestrial environments have focused on preserving patches of natural habitats and restoring disturbed habitats, with the main goal of transforming them into forests or habitats that resemble the original conditions. This approach tends to overlook the importance of conserving early succes-sional vegetation (e.g., riverside...
Article
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Tick-borne rickettsiosis is becoming a common emergent disease in many tropical countries, and the rapid detection of this disease could reduce the impact on wild life and public health. Pools of larvae and nymphs, and individual adult ticks are used for detection of Rickettsia species (Rickettsiaceae), but the number of larvae and nymphs in the po...
Article
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El Niño and La Niña climatic oscillations have dramatic effects on population dynamics and community structure of different animals. For marine birds, El Niño phenomenon drastically increases their mortality and reduces their reproductive success. In terrestrial ecosystems, the lack of long-term longitudinal data limits our understanding of the imp...
Article
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Los factores biomecánicos, el comportamiento e historia natural de las especies pueden influenciar la forma y dimensión del ala en las aves. Por lo tanto, la morfología de las alas de cada especie podría estar adaptada al ambiente en el que habitan. En palomas (familia Columbidae) existe un gradiente de especies que tienden a volar mucho y otras qu...
Article
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The article Mating and aggressive behaviour of Brachyrhaphis olomina (Cyprinodontiformes: Poeciliidae), written by Carlos A. Garita-Alvarado, Beatriz Naranjo-Elizondo and Gilbert Barrantes was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 21 August, 2017 without open access.
Article
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Populations may become isolated by distance, geographic barriers or both. Isolated populations often diverge in behavioral, morphological and genetic traits as a result of reduced inter-population gene flow. Highland species commonly present naturally fragmented distributions that confine populations to the highest mountain peaks, isolated by mount...
Data
Genotypes, morphological measurements and acoustic data for Thryorchilus browni individuals. (XLSX)
Article
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The characteristics and designs of webs provide valuable information on ecology, behavior and phylogenetic relationships. Characters are often obtained from detailed analyses of web photographs. We describe new methods to enhance web visibility; they consisted of painting the inner surfaces of Petri dishes with an opaque black spray paint that prod...
Article
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A common allometric pattern called Haller's Rule states that small species have relatively larger brains and eyes than larger species of the same taxonomic group. This pattern imposes drastic structural changes and energetic costs on small species to produce and maintain a disproportionate amount of nervous tissue. Indeed, several studies have show...
Article
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Ant-plant mutualistic interactions are common and the degree of specialization varies greatly. Some Pseudomyrmex ants maintain an obligate mutualistic relationship with a group of plants in the genus Vachellia. Ants aggressively defend the resources the plants provide (food and shelter) against a wide range of herbivores and food robbers. A few art...
Preprint
Full-text available
Conspecific negative density-dependence (CNDD) is one of the main mechanisms proposed to regulate species coexistence. Tropical highland forests, in contrast to diverse lowland forests, are commonly dominated by a few tree species. Testing the importance of density-dependence effects on seedling establishment of dominant trees may provide insights...
Article
Full-text available
Information theory and its indices were developed for human communication to predict the amount of information transferred in a message. One such index, the Shannon-Weiner index (SWI), has often been used to analyse information from other fields in which its application may not be appropriate. In ecoacoustics, SWI is used to compare acoustic divers...
Article
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Females often invest more in parental care than males, but in social monogamous systems, males invest as much as females in caring for their offspring, and male contribution is believed essential for reproductive success in these systems. Here we describe the number of visits, the feeding rate to their nestlings, and the time on the nest invested b...
Article
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The final instar larvae of the koinobiont ectoparasitoids in the Polysphincta group of genera induce their host spiders to construct webs that protect the wasp pupa during its development. It has been hypothesized that changes in structure and design in the cocoon web correlate with the duration and characteristics of the normal web. Kapogea cyrtop...
Article
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Despite the increasing interest in the use of intromittent male genitalia and coercive mating behaviour in poeciliids, detailed studies of the mating behaviour of most species in this family are lacking. We describe here the mating and aggressive behaviours of Brachyrhaphis olomina, and correlate them with the condition of the female’s ovum and emb...
Article
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Orb webs evolved primarily to capture prey, though they also have other functions. Recently, it has been argued that the orb web does not work as a functional unit, but instead some sections or components have presumably been shaped by selection to increase capture success of large prey (relative to the spider size). Changes in these components (e....
Article
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The hosts and cocoon webs of koinobiont-ectoparasitic wasps in the genus Eruga Townes in Townes & Townes, 1960 are known for only two species. We describe here the host spider and cocoon web of a third Eruga species: E.Telljohanni Gauld, 1991. This wasp parasitizes Leucauge White, 1841 species, which are induced to construct a highly modified cocoo...
Article
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We here report a case of human lactrodectism in Costa Rica, caused by the spider Latrodectus geometricus, included in the group known as “black widows”. A 27 year-old woman was bitten by a Brown Widow spider in her home in Cartago city. She showed a moderately severe case with the following sequence of symptoms: an acute, intense local pain begins...
Article
Duets are highly coordinated acoustical displays produced by two individuals. Studying the structure of duet songs and its causes is essential to understand the ecological role and evolution of this form of communication. Our goals in this study were to describe the structure of the duet of the Large-footed Finch, the temporal synchronization of ea...
Article
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Deforestation and changes in land use have reduced the tropical dry forest to isolated forest patches in northwestern Costa Rica. We examined the effect of patch area and length of the dry season on nestedness of the entire avian community, forest fragment assemblages, and species occupancy across fragments for the entire native avifauna, and for a...
Article
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Deforestation and land use change have reduced the tropical dry forest in the northwestern region of Costa Rica into isolated fragments. We examined the effect of fragment area and length of the dry season (seasonality) on nestedness for the community (entire species matrix), assemblages (forest fragments), and species occupancy across fragments fo...
Preprint
Full-text available
Deforestation and land use change have reduced the tropical dry forest in the northwestern region of Costa Rica into isolated fragments. We examined the effect of fragment area and length of the dry season (seasonality) on nestedness for the community (entire species matrix), assemblages (forest fragments), and species occupancy across fragments fo...
Article
Full-text available
Tres nidos de la Cotinga Nivosa Carpodectes nitidus muestran un diseño muy simple, que consiste en una plataforma construida de ramitas y zarcillos, similar al descrito previamente para esta especie y para otras cotingas. La alimentación del pichón (en uno de los nidos) consiste en artrópodos, ranas y frutos, con una mayor proporción de dieta anima...
Article
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Behavior can provide useful traits for testing phylogenetic hypotheses, and some details of orb web construction behavior have been especially useful in characterizing higher-level groups in spiders. The cues used to guide construction behavior and behavioral responses to these cues hold similar promise, but have never been used in phylogenetic stu...
Article
Duetting has been widely studied, and its function vary across species, though in all cases temporal synchrony of the elements sang by each sex in the duet seems to play an important role. My goals in this study were to describe the structure of the duet of Pezopetes capitalis, and the degree of temporal synchronization of each individual of the pa...
Article
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Songbirds have been traditionally classified into close-ended or open-ended learning species according to the length of the sensitive period during which birds are able to memorize new vocalizations. Closed-ended learners are generally not capable of changing their song after the first year of life, while open-ended learners show song plasticity as...
Article
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In male spiders, genitalia, sexual behaviour and secondary sex morphology tend to diverge rapidly across species, presumably as a result of sexual selection. In the three Leucauge species for which pre- and copulatory courtship behaviour is known, females clamp the male chelicerae prior to and during copulation. This brings the basal segment of the...
Chapter
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This chapter focuses on descriptive and experimental studies of the sexual biology of two spider species, Leucauge mariana and Leucauge argyra . We examine general questions related to female effects on paternity by taking advantage of several unusual traits: direct female participation in forming copulatory plugs and physical clasping by the femal...
Article
Full-text available
In male spiders, genitalia, sexual behaviour and secondary sex morphology tend to diverge rapidly across species, presumably as a result of sexual selection. In the three Leucauge species for which pre- and copulatory courtship behaviour is known, females clamp the male chelicerae prior to and during copulation. This brings the basal segment of the...
Article
Full-text available
The interaction among natural selection, sexual selection, and species-specific ecological requirements is responsible for the evolution of complex courtship behaviors and breeding strategies. In some anurans, the breeding season is restricted to a short period each year (explosive breeders). Rhinophrynus dorsalis is a species with one of the short...
Book
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Durante los últimos años se ha desarrollado una serie de programas y lenguajes estadís-ticos de libre acceso. Dentro de estos se en-cuentra el lenguaje estadístico R, el cual es el más robusto, y por su gran flexibilidad permi-te realizar una gran cantidad de trabajos que abarca desde el análisis estadístico básico, análisis acústico y análisis esp...
Article
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Attacks by predators and parasitoids on spider eggs are common. To counteract their negative effect, spiders have evolved a series of behaviours and features related to their egg sacs. In the genus Deinopis (Deinopidae) the tightly woven external layer of the egg sac seems to be an effective barrier. This layer consists of two sub-layers: the outer...
Article
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Sexual selection is thought to be an important force driving the evolution of sexually dimorphic morphology and behavior, but direct experimental tests of the functions of species-specific details of morphology are rare and usually incomplete. The males of most species of the large spider family Tetragnathidae possess large sexually dimorphic cheli...
Article
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The Large-footed Finch is an endemic inhabitant of the understory of montane forest and paramo in the highlands of Costa Rica and western Panama. Although this species is common, information regarding its reproductive biology and natural history is scarce. In this study, we described habitat use, reproductive behavior, parental care, and the acoust...