Wesley Dáttilo

Institute of Ecology INECOL | INECOL · Ecoetología

Knowledge of the mechanisms that shape biodiversity is essential to understand the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of interacting species. Recent studies posit that most of the organization of mutualistic networks is shaped by differences in species abundance among interacting species. In this study, we examined the mutualism involving plants...

Trying to unravel Darwin's entangled bank further, we describe the architecture of a network involving multiple forms of mutualism (pollination by animals, seed dispersal by birds and plant protection by ants) and evaluate whether this multi-network shows evidence of a structure that promotes robustness. We found that species differed strongly in t...

Biotic interactions underlie ecosystem structure and function, but predicting interaction outcomes is difficult.We tested the hypothesis that biotic interaction strength increases toward the equator, using a global experiment with model caterpillars to measure predation risk. Across an 11,660-kilometer latitudinal gradient spanning six continents,...

Aim Similar to species richness, ecological interactions can vary across latitudinal and environmental gradients. Knowing the patterns and drivers of such variation could help us to better understand the role of species interactions in maintaining biodiversity. In this study, we analysed the macroecological patterns of the structure and interaction...

Based on graph theory studies this book seeks to understand how tropical species interact with each other and how these interactions are affected by perturbations in some of the most species-rich habitats on earth. Due to the great diversity of species and interactions in the tropics, this book addresses a wide range of current and future issues wi...

Background and Aims: Several studies have emphasized the important role of howler monkeys (Alouatta palliata mexicana) in seed dispersal and, as a result, in the regeneration of fleshy-fruited plant populations in tropical forests. However, there is little empirical evidence regarding the possible mechanisms that would allow howler monkeys to promo...

The study of above- and below-ground organ plant coordination is crucial for understanding the biophysical constraints and trade-offs involved in species' performance under different environmental conditions. Environmental stress is expected to increase constraints on species trait combinations, resulting in stronger coordination among the organs i...

1. In Mexico, most forest habitats have been lost, leaving mostly agroecosystems such as coffee plantations. In some areas, coffee plants are commonly planted under a closed canopy of shade trees and sometimes these coffee plantations are transformed into cattle pastures, in which scattered and isolated trees remain. 2. Isolated trees (i.e. trees w...

Landscape changes in tropical environments result in long-lasting and complex changes in biodiversity that involve several biological responses (e.g., loss of species diversity and functional diversity). Both taxonomic and functional diversity might respond differently to land-use change, and this response might also vary depending on several facto...

β-diversity has been under continuous debate, with a current need to better understand the way in which a new wave of measures work. We assessed the results of 12 incidence-based β-diversity indices. Our results of gradual species composition overlap between paired assemblages considering progressive differences in species richness show that: (i) f...

The Neotropical region hosts 4,225 freshwater fish species, ranking first among the world’s most diverse regions for freshwater fishes. Our NEOTROPICAL FRESHWATER FISHES data set is the first to produce a large-scale Neotropical freshwater fish inventory, covering the entire Neotropical region from Mexico and the Caribbean in the north, to the sout...

Current climate change is disrupting biotic interactions and eroding biodiversity worldwide. However, species sensitive to aridity, high temperatures and climate variability might find shelter in microclimatic refuges, such as leaf rolls built by arthropods. To explore how the importance of leaf shelters for terrestrial arthropods changes with lati...

One hundred years after the flu pandemic of 1918, the world faces an outbreak of a new severe acute respiratory syndrome, caused by a novel coronavirus. With a high transmissibility, the pandemic has spread worldwide, creating a scenario of devastation in many countries. By the middle of 2021, about 3% of the world population had been infected and...

Scientometric investigation and scientific production analysis are essential for science progress. Although a vast number of studies on Brazilian ant diversity have been carried out, a critical analysis of the advances in its scientific production is still missing. We compiled a comprehensive database on ant diversity papers carried out in the Braz...

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...

The construction of shelters on plants by arthropods might influence other organisms via changes in colonization, community richness, species composition and functionality. Arthropods, including beetles, caterpillars, sawflies, spiders, and wasps often interact with host plants via the construction of shelters, building a variety of structures such...

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...

How ecological interactions vary across spatial and environmental gradients has received increasing attention in recent years, contributing to the revelation of the drivers of biodiversity. However, it is still unclear how the structure of ecological interactions varies across large spatial scales and which climatic factors are associated with such...

Closely related species tend to be more similar than randomly selected species from the same phylogenetic tree. This pattern, known as a phylogenetic signal, has been extensively studied for intrinsic (e.g. morphology), as well as extrinsic (e.g. climatic preferences), properties but less so for ecological interactions. Phylogenetic signals of spec...

Recent studies have shown that several sources of variation can influence our ability to quantify biological responses to environmental variables, and that spatial scales are important in this process. For instance, sampling methods may differ in their efficiency or specificity, leading to different inferred relationships between community response...

The patterns of insect movement are the cumulate product of many individual decisions and can be shaped by the way morphology and behaviour interacts with landscape structure and composition. Hence, the ongoing process of habitat fragmentation increases the distance among suitable habitats and changes those in such a way that it may favour some mov...

Hundred years after the flu pandemic of 1918, the world faces an outbreak of a new severe acute respiratory syndrome, caused by a novel coronavirus. With a high transmissibility, the pandemic spreads worldwide, creating a scenario of devastation in many countries. By the middle of 2021, about 3% of the world population has been infected and more th...

• Termite nests may offer shelter to a number of species, alleviating the effects of environmental harshness. Certain elevational gradients provide variation on edaphoclimatic features, possibly generating harsh environmental conditions and boosting the number of immigrants seeking shelter within termitaria. Therefore, it is expected that metrics d...

Intensification of urbanization has been shown to be associated with taxonomic and functional modifications of biological communities, leading to changes in trophic interactions. These changes may reduce the delivery of ecosystem services provided by urban ecosystems. For instance, predation on herbivorous insects is an important ecological process...

A second deadlier wave of COVID-19 and the causes of the recent public health collapse of Manaus are compared with the Spanish flu events in that city, and Brazil. Historic sanitarian problems, and its hub position in the Brazilian airway network are combined drivers of deadly events related to COVID-19. These drivers were amplified by misleading g...

The Atlantic Forest has lost most of its native area due to the ongoing processes of habitat conversion. The suppression of the forest for the implementation mainly of agriculture has created varied environmental mosaics, modifying the native landscapes and affecting natural populations and their ecological interactions. We aimed to evaluate if bot...

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...

In this remembrance, we have brought together some of Victor Rico‐Gray’s friends and collaborators to recall his many contributions to tropical ecology and his influence on so many young scientists. Victor’s research ranged from Mexican ethnobotany to the evolutionary ecology of complex interactions between ants and plants. His research was highly...

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...

How much leaf area do insects eat? A data set of insect herbivory sampled globally with a standardized protocol. Ecology 102(4): Abstract. Herbivory is ubiquitous. Despite being a potential driver of plant distribution and performance, herbivory remains largely undocumented. Some early attempts have been made to review, globally, how much leaf area...

• Understanding the processes that shape biotic interactions within biological communities helps us to develop strategies for the establishment of ecological communities and to rehabilitate the functionality of degraded environments. • We evaluated the functional diversity of cavity‐nesting bees and wasps and their interaction networks established...

During the last decades, urbanization has been highlighted as one of the main causes of biodiversity loss worldwide. Among organisms commonly associated with urban environments, ants occupy urbanized green areas and can live both inside and around human settlements. However, despite the increasing number of studies on the ecological dynamics of ant...

Aim Different patterns of the species richness‐elevation relationship have been detected on mountains, however how these arise is unclear. Some patterns may be related to two different colonization processes: Lineages colonizing from adjacent lowlands (a ‘vertical’ model) or from different latitudes (a ‘horizontal’ model), or both. We aimed to test...

Habitat loss and fragmentation are the primary causes of global population decline of amphibians and reptiles. In Brazil, that hosts an extraordinary herpetofaunal richness, amphibians and reptiles are clearly undersampled among vertebrate groups in fragmentation research. This bias may underestimate the effects of fragmentation on herpetofauna in...

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...

Herbivory is ubiquitous. Despite being a potential driver of plant distribution and performance, herbivory remains largely undocumented. Some early attempts have been made to review, globally, how much leaf area is removed through insect feeding. Kozlov et al. (2015), in one of the most comprehensive reviews regarding global patterns of herbivory,...

Current climate change is disrupting biotic interactions and eroding biodiversity worldwide. However, species sensitive to drought, high temperatures and climate variability might persist in microclimatic refuges, such as leaf shelters built by arthropods. We conducted a distributed experiment across an 11,790 km latitudinal gradient to explore how...

Both decreases in compositional similarity with increasing geographic distances between sites (i.e. distance–decay relationship) and vertical stratification of species composition are key issues in ecology. However, the intersection between these two trends has scarcely been investigated. Here we use identical sampling methods in the canopy and at...

• Tropical trees accommodate a high co‐occurrence of ant species, mainly due to the high diversity of microhabitats available. However, a few ant species are highly abundant, dominating resources and defending territories in tree canopies. Although arboreal ants have been studied extensively, little is known about the structural drivers of ant spat...

Biodiversity loss is currently one of the most important societal concerns worldwide, and it is caused mainly by habitat loss and fragmentation, biological invasion, and climate change (Vitousek et al. 1996, Newbold et al. 2015, Bellard et al. 2016). Introduced species can have positive effects on human well‐being, especially when used for liveliho...

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...

Several biotic and abiotic factors change across time and space, which may directly affect not only the distribution and abundance of species but also other dimensions of biodiversity such as ecological functions and biotic interactions. Over such spatial and temporal gradients, interactions among species form complex ecological networks with emerg...

The spread of SARS-CoV-2 and the distribution of cases worldwide followed no clear biogeographic, climatic, or cultural trend. Conversely, the internationally busiest cities in all countries tended to be the hardest hit, suggesting a basic, mathematically neutral pattern of the new coronavirus early dissemination. We tested whether the number of fl...

Habitat loss and fragmentation are among the main threats to global biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, major research biases and knowledge shortfalls in some geographical regions, taxonomic groups and responses studied are recurrent in fragmentation-related research. Therefore, detecting these biases and associated gaps is crucial to ste...

Frugivory networks exhibit a set of properties characterized by a number of network theory‐derived metrics. Their structures often form deterministic patterns that can be explained by the functional roles of interacting species. Although we know lots about how these networks are organized when ecosystems are in a complete, functional condition, we...

In semi-arid environments, the marked contrast in temperature and precipitation over the year strongly shapes ecological communities. The composition of species and their ecological interactions within a community may vary greatly over time. Although intra-annual variations are often studied, empirical information on how plant–bird relationships ar...

A key factor to study ants is the choice of an appropriate sampling method since distinct sampling methods can capture distinct ant fauna and, therefore, leading to bias in the interpretation and conclusion of the patterns observed. Despite it is well known that the ant fauna is vertically stratified, some of the sampling methods cannot be used thr...

The local, global or functional extinction of species or populations of animals, known as defaunation, can erode important ecological services in tropical forests. Many mutualistic interactions, such as seed dispersal of large seeded plants, can be lost in large continuous forests due to the rarity of large-bodied mammalian frugivores. Most of stud...

Background We investigated a likely scenario of COVID-19 spreading in Brazil through the complex airport network of the country, for the 90 days after the first national occurrence of the disease. After the confirmation of the first imported cases, the lack of a proper airport entrance control resulted in the infection spreading in a manner directl...

Understanding the mechanisms driving host–parasite interactions has important ecological and epidemiological implications. Traditionally, most studies dealing with host–parasite interaction networks have focused on species relationship patterns, and intra-population variation in such networks has been widely overlooked. In this study, we tested whe...

Nestedness is widely observed in natural metacommunities, but its underlying mechanisms are still poorly understood. The distribution of habitats in the landscape and differences in dispersal rates of distinct insect taxa can determine the nestedness of the metacommunity. Here, we evaluated how species habitat specialization contributes to metacomm...

Nestedness is widely observed in natural metacommunities, but its underlying mechanisms are still poorly understood. The distribution of habitats in the landscape and differences in dispersal rates of distinct insect taxa can determine the nestedness of the metacommunity. Here, we evaluated how species habitat specialization contributes to metacomm...

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

Supplementary material of the paper 'Searching for keystone plant resources in fruit-frugivore interaction networks across the Neotropics' accepted for publication in Biotropica (April 2020). ABSTRACT Identifying keystone plant resources (KPR) is a contentious issue in ecology and conservation. Despite recent advances provided by mutualistic netwo...

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,...

en Identifying keystone plant resources (KPR) is a contentious issue in ecology and conservation. Despite recent advances provided by mutualistic networks, we still lack studies addressing large‐scale identification of keystone plants. We developed a novel quantitative framework for the large‐scale identification of KPR that combines centrality and...

Recently, a wide array of epidemiological models have been developed to guide public health actors in containing the rapid dissemination of the new severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), cause of COVID-19. Despite their usefulness, many epidemiological models recently developed to understand the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and infec...

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...