When the predator becomes the prey: new records of intraguild predation among Central American and Caribbean arachnids (Arachnida: Amblypygi, Araneae, Scorpiones)

ABSTRACT

Intraguild predation occurs when an organism preys on a competitor. This ecological interaction can have considerable consequences on the population dynamics of predators and indirectly affect their prey. In arachnids, it is a quite common phenomenon, but it has been poorly documented in the Neotropical region. Here, we present records of 16 species feeding on other 14 species of arachnids. The most common families that acted as predators were Buthidae (Scorpiones) and Salticidae (Araneae), while the most common prey were members of the families Araneidae and Ctenidae (Araneae). In our survey, Drake Bay, in Costa Rica, is overrepresented due to years of systematic observations by two of the coauthors.

KEYWORDS:

• Arachnid
• intraguild predation
• Cuba
• Costa Rica
• Honduras

Acknowledgments

We wish to express our gratitude to Dr. Eric P. van den Berghe (General Director of the Zamorano Pan-American Agricultural School) and biologist Josué Galdámez (Escuela de Biología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras), for allowing us to make use of their observations. We thank the biologist Arles García for the support provided in the field trips carried out in the Barras de Cuero y Salado wildlife refuge. We are also grateful to the Cuero y Salado Foundation (FUCSA) for the logistical support provided within the Barras de Cuero y Salado Wildlife Refuge, and finally to Vincent Roth Fund for Systematic Research provided by the American Society for Arachnology (provided to the first author AMCR 2022). We thank David Ortiz Martinez (Department of Botany and Zoology, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic) for the photograph of the predation event of the scorpion C. gracilis by the spider S. longipes and additional data kindly provided. This work was supported by CNPq (ADB PQ grant 303903/2019-8). DDC was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt foundation.

Disclosure statement

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