Pairwise interactions in tropical ant communities

Ecological communities are structured by competitive, predatory, mutualistic and parasitic interactions combined with chance events. Separating deterministic from stochastic processes is possible, but finding statistical evidence for specific biological interactions is challenging. We attempt to solve this problem for ant communities nesting in epiphytic bird’s nest ferns (Asplenium nidus) in Borneo’s lowland rainforest. By recording the frequencies with which each and every single ant species occurred together, we were able to test statistically for patterns associated with interspecific competition. We found evidence for competition, but the resulting co-occurrence pattern was the opposite of what we expected. Rather than detecting species segregation—the classical hallmark of competition—we found species aggregation. Moreover, our approach of testing individual pairwise interactions mostly revealed spatially positive rather than negative associations. Significant negative interactions were only detected among large ants, and among species of the subfamily Ponerinae. Remarkably, the results from this study, and from a corroborating analysis of ant communities known to be structured by competition, suggest that competition within the ants leads to species aggregation rather than segregation. We believe this unexpected result is linked with the displacement of species following asymmetric competition. We conclude that analysing co-occurrence frequencies across complete species assemblages, separately for each species, and for each unique pairwise combination of species, represents a subtle yet powerful way of detecting structure and compartmentalisation in ecological communities.We acknowledge support from the University of Cambridge, NERC, The Royal Society South East Asia Rainforest Research Programme, Yayasan Sabah, Danum Valley Management Committee, and the Economic Planning Unit in Kuala Lumpur. TMF was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (14-32302S, 16-09427S), and the Australian Research Council (DP140101541).This is the author accepted manuscript. It is currently under an indefinite embargo pending publication by Elsevie

Quantifying the relative roles of selective and neutral processes in defining eukaryotic microbial communities

We have a limited understanding of the relative contributions of different processes that regulate microbial communities, which are crucial components of both natural and agricultural ecosystems. The contributions of selective and neutral processes in defining community composition are often confounded in field studies because as one moves through space, environments also change. Managed ecosystems provide an excellent opportunity to control for this and evaluate the relative strength of these processes by minimising differences between comparable niches separated at different geographic scales. We use next-generation sequencing to characterize the variance in fungal communities inhabiting adjacent fruit, soil and bark in comparable vineyards across 1000 kms in New Zealand. By compartmentalizing community variation, we reveal that niche explains at least four times more community variance than geographic location. We go beyond merely demonstrating that different communities are found in both different niches and locations by quantifying the forces that define these patterns. Overall, selection unsurprisingly predominantly shapes these microbial communities, but we show the balance of neutral processes also have a significant role in defining community assemblage in eukaryotic microbes