Pedro Luna

Universidad de Las Américas | UDLA

Although ecologists have identified the key factors influencing species distribution along elevation gradients, each mountain’s distinct characteristics, including its geology and biotic colonization processes, are often overlooked. The uniqueness of each mountain ecosystem implies that species distribution and the factors affecting them may vary a...

Historically, ferns have been described as underutilized by insects. However, studies have shown a diversity of insects interacting with ferns, although the evolutionary and ecological drivers of these interactions are still to be untangled. To fill these gaps, we compiled more than 100 yr of global data on insect–fern interactions from the literat...

The honeybee Apis mellifera is an introduced managed pollinator species in many world regions and exhibits a high capacity to compete for resources against native bee species. Despite empirical evidence showing that A. mellifera establishes a great number of interactions within plant-bee interaction networks (i.e., high interactive role), little is...

Main Animals not only forage for abundant and nearby resources, but their diets can also be influenced by abiotic and geographic factors. This often results in non‐random interactions among species. We investigate how seed density, distance from nest, abiotic (e.g., climate stability, temperature, precipitation) and geographic factors (e.g., latitu...

There is growing evidence showing that insect diversity is rapidly decaying due to direct and indirect impacts derived from climate change. However, most studies have only focused on how current and future changes in climate may affect insect diversity, physiology and behavior, neglecting their numerous biotic interactions with different organisms....

Natural selection favours animals that forage more efficiently, such as those finding food faster, choosing better patches or increasing their rate of energy gain. Indeed, foraging behaviour has an effect on fitness, with better foragers producing more offspring. However, the evolution of foraging behaviour and its consequences on reproductive succ...

Aim Most biodiversity studies have considered species to be isolated entities, neglecting the fact that their biotic interactions and spatial variation are fundamental to their persistence across elevational gradients. Here, using a standardized sampling methodology, we evaluated how and why the composition of flower–visitor interactions (i.e. bet...

Although biological invasions are a common and intensively studied phenomenon, most studies often ignore the biotic interactions that invasive species play in the environment. Here, we evaluated how and why invasive plant species are interconnected within the overall frugivory network of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, an important global biodiversi...

The study of population movements and abundance are useful to evaluate the reduction of biodiversity due to changes in landscape composition and configuration. These parameters are modulated by the effects of landscape on individuals' behaviours and species' life histories (e.g., specialists and generalists in forest use). We used hierarchical mode...

Studies at local spatial scales have shown that the generalist honeybee Apis mellifera L. can strongly affect the structural organization and properties of pollination networks. However, there is still little knowledge on how the connectivity of the honeybee within networks (i.e., interactive role) could affect pollination networks at a global scal...

Empirical evidence has shown that introduced honeybees, Apis mellifera L., can change the structural organization of ecological networks involving pollinators and flowering plants. In this case, studies have shown that A. mellifera is highly connected within networks (i.e., high interactive role) mainly due to its high abundances, long colony lifet...

Despite increasing knowledge of the ecological interactions between species, the dynamics of anurans in aquatic environments are little explored. Thus, our work aims to assess which factors influence the composition and the ecological interactions of hylid anuran species in oxbow lakes in the middle Purus River, Amazonas state, Brazil. We sampled h...

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...

Trophic specialisation is known to vary across space, but the environmental factors explaining such variation remain elusive. Here we used a global dataset of flower-visitor networks to evaluate how trophic specialisation varies between latitudinal zones (tropical and temperate) and across elevation gradients, while considering the environmental va...

Despite the increasing amount of knowledge available regarding the ecological interactions between species, the dynamics of anurans in aquatic environments are little explored and understood. In this way, our work aims to assess which factors influence the composition and the ecological interactions of hylid anurans in oxbow lakes in the middle Pur...

Animals and plants are involved in a great number of trophic relationships that are responsible for the origin, maintenance and function of biodiversity. This great number of interactions between animals and plants gives rise to large and complex networks of ecological interactions. In the past few decades, the study of plant-animal interaction net...

1. The factors that drive resource removal by insect predators hold the clue to understanding their role in structuring ecological communities and their evolution. Harvester ants are formidable seed predators and invertebrate carcass feeders. However, the extent to which neutral and niche‐based factors drive the selection and removal of preferred f...

Understanding the impacts of edge effects on ecological interactions plays an integral role in planning ecosystem recovery from human perturbations, as well as conservation of habitats. Edge effects related to forest fragmentation cause changes in species diversity that can disrupt ecological networks. Here, we evaluated how the diversity of, and i...

Mammalian carnivores are considered a key group in maintaining ecological health and can indicate potential ecological integrity in landscapes where they occur. Carnivores also hold high conservation value and their habitat requirements can guide management and conservation plans. The order Carnivora has 84 species from 8 families in the Neotropica...

En este articulo hablamos del proceso de polinización, dispersión de semillas y de la crisis mundial de polinizadores.

To reduce herbivory, plants bearing extrafloral nectaries interact with ants and attract them by providing food. As plant bodyguards, ants respond to the resource provision and, using their antennae, detect chemical messages from the host plants that help them to locate herbivores. Ants can also use their vision to explore the environment; however,...

Butterfly species often synchronize their life cycles to seasonality, as increasing temperature and rainfall act as clues of resource availability. Nevertheless, human-made forest edges cause major changes in the microclimatic conditions that may jeopardize the synchrony between insects and favorable conditions for their emergence, conversely to na...

A team of 79 scientists from more than 50 institutions partnered to gather all available information regarding Mexican ants since 1894, the year in which the first geographical record of an ant is known for the country. In this new study, including more than 21,000 records, we showed that there are ~900 species of ants in Mexico, which are distribu...

A team of 79 scientists from more than 50 institutions partnered to gather all available information regarding Mexican ants since 1894, the year in which the first geographical record of an ant is known for the country. In this new study, including more than 21,000 records, we showed that there are ~900 species of ants in Mexico, which are distribu...

A team of 79 scientists from more than 50 institutions partnered to gather all available information regarding Mexican ants since 1894, the year in which the first geographical record of an ant is known for the country. In this new study, including more than 21,000 records, we showed that there are ~900 species of ants in Mexico, which are distribu...

Mexico is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, with an important proportion of endemism mainly because of the convergence of the Nearctic and Neotropical biogeographic regions, which generate great diversity and species turnover at different spatial scales. However, most of our knowledge of the Mexican ant biota is limited to a few we...

Biotic interactions are part of all ecosystem attributes and play an important role in the structure and stability of biological communities. In this study, we give a brief account of how the threads of biotic interactions are linked and how we can measure such complexity by focusing on mutualistic interactions. We start by explaining that although...

In tropical forests, twigs are the nesting resources most frequently occupied by ants in the leaf litter. During occupation, this resource may be shared among different arthropods, such as ants or non-ant arthropods, but the mechanisms that promote cohabitation in this context are poorly known. In this study, we examined if twig structure influence...

In this data paper, we compiled all the available published and unpublished geographic information (including both incidence and abundance records) about native and exotic ant species recorded within Mexico over 124 years (from 1894–2018). After exhaustive filtering, the updating of information and the curation of synonyms, our data set contains 21...

Social insects utilise a complex spatial orientation system mediated by chemical signals. This study investigated how the foraging behavior of ants (Dorymyrmex thoracicus) varies depending upon the quantity of an available resource using a field experiment. Further, we demonstrated computationally that ant displacement is compatible with a model ba...

1. Harvester ants perform important ecological functions, such as seed predation and redistribution of nutrients in the soil, through a complex of ecological interactions. Most studies are static descriptions of network structure, while their temporal organisations and the factors that modulate it have been neglected. 2. This study describes the te...

Twig cavities are microhabitats that may be used by different ant species for nesting and colony expansion. However, ants do not colonize all twigs available in the leaf litter, pointing to the existence of environmental or twig-related filters. In this study, we analyzed which environmental and twig attributes affected twig occupation by ants. We...

Despite the increasing number of studies dealing with interaction networks in the last few years, there is still a lack of knowledge about how their structural organization are affected by changes in binary or weighted data. To fill this gap, we collected ants foraging on plants with extrafloral nectaries in 10 sites within the Brazilian Amazon to...

The preferences of seed intake by harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex spp.) have been debated for a long time, mainly due the lack of repeatable methods to draw clear conclusions. However, several characteristics of the food resource are well recognized as the drivers of such selective predation. For instance, resource quality (i.e., availability of carbo...

Despite the growing knowledge regarding biotic interactions, the diversity and turnover of species interactions is one of the least understood and explored components in studies dealing with species interaction networks. Since the spatial and temporal distribution of animals and plants is unequal, their pairwise interactions are also expected to va...

Granivory is an important interaction in the arid and semi-arid zones of the world, since seeds form an abundant and nutritious resource in these areas. While species of the genus Pogonomyrmex have been studied in detail as seed predators, their impact on seed abundance in the soil has not yet been explored in sufficient depth. We studied the impac...

In the last years, there were a growing number of studies using the metric H 2' to calculate complementary specialization in host-parasite interaction networks. However, only a few studies have explored the sensitivity of H 2' to network dimensions (i.e. species richness and number of interactions), which consequently could generate studies that ar...

Mainly owing to their high diversity and abundance, ants are formidable as predators and defenders of foliage. Consequently, ants can exclude both invertebrate and vertebrate activity on plants via direct and indirect interactions as already shown in many previous studies. Here we present empirical evidence that objects resembling ant shape on dumm...

RESUMEN. Se compara la actividad forrajera de Formícidos asociados a Ferocactus latispinus (Cactaceae) en relación a la actividad de sus nectarios extraflorales (NEFs) en dos horarios (matutino-nocturno) en el valle semi árido de Zapotitlán, Puebla, México. Se registraron cinco especies de hormigas, cuya riqueza y abundancia cambia con respecto al...