Abstract The soil fauna of tropical rainforests is difficult to study because of its extreme species richness and taxonomic impediment. Studies of multi-taxon assemblages in the soil of tropical rainforests are relatively rare and studies of interspecific interactions, such as predation, even rarer. Here we attempt to infer prey predator interactions and enemy-free space from the faunal composition of 100 litter/soil samples obtained from Barro Colorado Island in Panama during the dry and wet seasons. We focused on assemblages of ants (assigned to categories of non-predators, potential and confirmed predators), springtails and termites, which were characterized by their Barcode Index Numbers. Overall in 0.2 m3 of soil/litter we collected 2129 ants, 5592 springtails and 260 termites, which represented 80, 104 and 15 species, respectively. The faunal composition of confirmed ant predators was spatially coincident with that of Collembola. However, despite considerable seasonal shifts in the rank abundance of Collembola species, seasonal shifts of confirmed ant predators were low, resulting in a poor match of seasonal shifts between ants and their prey items. No location could be considered as being relatively free of ant enemies for springtails or termites, but the dry season supported higher prey-predator ratios than the wet season. We inferred only 4 possible prey-predator interactions, out of 7616 potential interactions in the study system. The relative dispersion of confirmed ant predators, which only weakly influenced springtail and termite assemblages, suggests low specificity in ant-prey interactions. This confirms that “brown food webs” may be structured by bottom-up effects rather than by top-down effects.

中文翻译：

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一个热带雨林土壤中的无敌空间和蚂蚁、跳虫和白蚁的分布

摘要 热带雨林土壤动物群因其极端的物种丰富度和分类学障碍而难以研究。对热带雨林土壤中多分类群组合的研究相对较少，而对诸如捕食等种间相互作用的研究则更为罕见。在这里，我们试图从在旱季和雨季从巴拿马巴罗科罗拉多岛获得的 100 个垃圾/土壤样本的动物群组成中推断猎物捕食者的相互作用和无敌空间。我们专注于蚂蚁的组合（分配到非捕食者、潜在和确认的捕食者类别）、跳虫和白蚁，它们的特征是它们的条形码索引号。总的来说，在 0.2 立方米的土壤/垃圾中，我们收集了 2129 只蚂蚁、5592 只跳虫和 260 只白蚁，分别代表 80、104 和 15 个物种。已确认的蚂蚁捕食者的动物群组成在空间上与跳虫的动物群组成一致。然而，尽管跳虫物种的等级丰度有相当大的季节性变化，但确认的蚂蚁捕食者的季节性变化很低，导致蚂蚁与其猎物之间的季节性变化不匹配。任何地方都不能被认为是相对没有跳虫或白蚁的蚂蚁天敌，但旱季比雨季支持更高的猎物-捕食者比例。在研究系统中的 7616 种潜在相互作用中，我们仅推断出 4 种可能的猎物-捕食者相互作用。已确认的蚂蚁捕食者的相对分散，仅对跳虫和白蚁组合产生微弱影响，表明蚂蚁与猎物相互作用的特异性较低。