Giovanni Ramón-Cabrera

• Master of Science
• PhD Candidate at Macquarie University

The Galápagos Archipelago, a unique and ever-changing natural experiment, has seen an increase in introduced species due to increased human mobility. Among these, introduced ants represent a significant concern given their potential to reach high densities and displace native fauna. This study analyzed the diet of six Galápagos lava lizard species...

The Galápagos Archipelago, a unique and ever-changing natural experiment, has seen an increase in introduced species due to increased human mobility. Among these, introduced ants represent a significant concern given their potential to reach high densities and displace native fauna. This study analyzed the diet of six Galápagos lava lizard species...

A pesar de la alta biodiversidad y endemismo en el Bosque Seco Tropical Interandino (BSTI), parte del Bosque Seco Tropical Estacional (BSTE), el estudio de la entomofauna en éste hábitat ha sido relegado. Este estudio tuvo como objetivo reducir la brecha de conocimiento respecto a la diversidad de escarabajos en un BSTI ecuatoriano, el Bosque Prote...

Ants are an excellent study system to understand the visual ecology of insects. Numerous studies have contributed to expanding our knowledge of the visual capabilities of various species. Ants of the genus Opisthopsis, commonly known as strobe ants, are native to the Indo-Australian and Australasian regions. Despite their intriguing morphology (i.e...

This work compares five different distance metrics (i.e., Euclidean, Chebyshev, Manhattan, Mahalanobis, and Canberra) implemented in the weighted Hausdorff distance (WHD) as part of the loss function during the training and validation of a fully convolutional neural network (FCNN) model for detecting ladybird beetle specimens. The FCNN-based detect...

In the Neotropics, Panopinae spider flies are the most diverse within Acroceridae, specializing as endoparasites of mygalomorph spiders. Camposella insignata Cole, 1919 is one of the most enigmatic flies within this subfamily, given its conspicuously enlarged antennal flagella and apparent rarity, with only two specimens known to this day. This pap...

Fast and accurate taxonomic identification of invasive trans-located ladybird beetle species is essential to prevent significant impacts on biological communities, ecosystem functions, and agricultural business economics. Therefore, in this work we propose a two-step automatic detector for ladybird beetles in random environment images as the first...

In this work, we propose a ladybird beetle detector based on a deep learning classifier and the weighted Hausdorff distance as a loss function. The detector was trained and validated using a ten-fold cross-validation method on a database composed of 2,633 wildlife images with ladybird beetles. Despite the detector performance was assessed using fou...

A ten day collecting trip to Napo province was conducted between January 13 and 23, 2020, visiting localities where W. C. Macintyre originally collected Argia schneideri Garrison & von Ellenrieder, 2017 between 1935 and 1942, with the intention of documenting its life habits and obtaining photographs in life. A total of 65 odonate species in 36 gen...

The study of mosquitoes is important in the prevention of vector-borne diseases. In Ecuador, knowledge on local mosquito biodiversity was pioneered by two entomologists whose contributions span the first half of the 20th century; these were Francisco Campos-Rivadeneira and Roberto Levi-Castillo. Both contributed to general aspects of entomology, an...

Argia mauffrayi n. sp. (Holotype ♂: ECUADOR, Pichincha Province, San Miguel de Los Bancos Cantón, Recinto Milpe, Milpe Bird Sanctuary, Mirador Uno Trail, 0.0333° N, 78.8661 W, 4 ix 2018, William F. Mauffray leg., in Laboratorio de Zoología Terrestre USFQ [ZSFQ]) is described and illustrated and compared with similar species.

We evaluated how the presence of sugar sources impacted the distribution of Aedes aegypti in different habitats in Durán, Ecuador. Land cover and normalized difference vegetation index maps were used to guide a random point sampling routine to select study grids (30 m × 30 m) in low vegetation (LV) and high vegetation (HV). Five individual plants,...

Ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) are an important component of insect biodiversity, and their study may help forensic entomologists to solve criminal cases. We review published literature and ecological principles that may guide forensic entomologists in the usage of ants as evidence with forensic value. Because ants are top predators in litter envir...

ABSTRACT.-Management of invasive species is considered one of the great challenges deriving from Global Change that our societies currently face, besides deforestation and the warming of the atmosphere. Little is known about the invasive ants in continental Ecuador, despite the world-wide demonstrated aggressiveness, negative ecological impact, and...

circundante, en un bosque pie-montano de los andes ecuatorianos. Se encontraron menos individuos y especies por m2 en los bancos de arcilla que en la hojarasca circundante. Cuatro especies de hormigas (Octostruma sp1, Octostruma. sp3, Cyphomyrmex sp3 y Crematogaster sp1) se encontraron preferentemente en la hojarasca. No se encontró ninguna especie...

The pre-montane forest of the northern Andes is considered one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. Tools for rapidly assessing biodiversity inventories are currently being developed and may aid conservation efforts. Here, we focus on the use of the Ants of the Leaf Litter (ALL) protocol as such a tool and describe the composition of an Ecu...

In the tropics, human disturbance continuously challenges initiatives for habitat conservation. In these regions, as economical budgets for conservation shrink, conservation planning requires precise information on when and how different kinds of disturbance may affect natural populations, but also on adequate experimental designs to monitor them....