From light to darkness: the duality of influence of habitat heterogeneity on Neotropical terrestrial cave invertebrate communities

ABSTRACT

The theory of habitat heterogeneity, which treats one of the global drivers of biodiversity, is valid for several taxonomic groups and distinct ecosystems, including subterranean environments. However, knowledge about the factors that influence the structure of subterranean communities remains limited, especially in Neotropical regions. We sought to understand the main drivers of invertebrate species richness and composition. For that, we compared the substrate elements of twilight and deep-cave zones and their associated invertebrate communities. Variations in habitat heterogeneity were significantly related to richness in the deep cave zone, but had no effect on the fauna associated with the twilight zone. The local heterogeneity enhanced the richness in the deep cave zone due to the increase in the number of available habitats and the effect on decreasing niche overlap. For communities’ composition, the geographic distribution of caves explained the similarity between the twilight zone of different caves. Therefore, nearby caves have a more similar fauna in the entrance regions but conversely, exhibit a higher dissimilarity between communities associated with the deep-cave zone. This study highlights the influence of local habitat heterogeneity on the invertebrate communities associated with different zones of the cave.

KEYWORDS:

• Composition
• richness
• subterranean habitats
• biodiversity
• arthropods

Acknowledgments

We thank the taxonomists that helped on identifications (L. Bernardi, A. C. Vasconcelos, R. Bastos-Pereira, A. Brescovit, D. Zeppelini, L. F. Iniesta, L. Ázara, M. Villela); to the team of Center of Studies on Subterranean Biology for the help in field work and on sorting, to the people who helped guiding and accompanying until finding the sampled caves; to the people who helped indicating caves and maps; to the groups of speleology that provided topographic maps (EPL, GBPE and SEE), especially the speleogroup Peter Lund, which also accompanied in several field works; and institutions that funded the present study, scholarships and infrastructure (FAPEMIG, Process No APQ 01281-13 and UFLA). PCRV is grateful to the CAPES for providing a scholarship. RLF is also grateful to the CNPq (Grant No. 308334/2018-3).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) [88887.626737/2021-00]; Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPQ) [308334/2018-3]; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais [APQ 01281-13].