Wood-boring beetle larvae act as ecosystem engineers by creating stem cavities that are used secondarily as nests by many arboreal ant species. Understanding the heterogeneity and distribution of available cavities and their use by ants is therefore key to understanding arboreal ant community assembly and diversity. Our goals were to quantify the abundance and diversity of beetle-produced cavity resources in a tropical canopy, reveal how ants use these resources, and determine which characteristics of the cavity resource contribute to ant use. We dissected branches from six common tree species in the Brazilian Cerrado savanna, measuring cavity characteristics and identifying the occupants. We sampled 2310 individual cavities, 576 of which were used as nests by 25 arboreal ant species. We found significant differences among tree species in the proportion of stem length bored by beetles, the number of cavities per stem length, average entrance-hole size, and the distribution of cavity volumes. The likelihood that a cavity was occupied was greater for cavities with larger entrance-hole sizes and larger volumes. In particular, there was a strong positive correlation between mean head diameters of ant species and the mean entrance-hole diameter of the cavities occupied by those ant species. Wood-boring beetles contribute to the structuring of the Cerrado ant community by differentially attacking the available tree species. In so doing, the beetles provide a wide range of entrance-hole sizes which ant species partition based on their body size, and large volume cavities that ants appear to prefer.

枯木甲虫幼虫通过创建茎腔来充当生态系统工程师，这些茎腔随后被许多树栖蚂蚁物种用作巢。因此，了解可用空洞的异质性和分布以及蚂蚁对它们的使用是理解树栖蚂蚁群落组装和多样性的关键。我们的目标是量化热带冠层中甲虫生产的腔体资源的丰富度和多样性，揭示蚂蚁如何使用这些资源，并确定腔体资源的哪些特征有助于蚂蚁的使用。我们从巴西Cerrado稀树草原中的6种常见树种中解剖了树枝，测量了洞的特征并确定了居住者。我们对2310个单独的腔进行了采样，其中576个被25个树栖蚂蚁物种用作巢。我们发现树木之间在甲虫无聊的茎长度比例，每茎长度的腔数，平均入口孔大小以及腔体积的分布之间存在显着差异。对于具有较大入口孔尺寸和较大体积的空腔，空腔被占据的可能性更大。特别是，蚂蚁物种的平均头径与这些蚂蚁物种所占据的空腔的平均入口孔直径之间存在很强的正相关关系。枯木甲虫通过有差别地攻击可用的树种，为塞拉多蚂蚁群落的结构做出了贡献。这样做，甲虫提供了范围广泛的入口孔尺寸，蚂蚁物种根据它们的体型进行分配，并且蚂蚁似乎更喜欢大体积的蛀牙。