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Reforestations of Tropical Forests Alter Interactions Between Web-Building Spiders and Their Prey

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Abstract

Immense effort has been devoted to mitigating the negative effect of deforestation, one of the main factors causing global change. However, the effect of reforestation management on food-webs has been rarely studied and no study so far has investigated the effect on predator–prey interactions in forest understories. We studied predator–prey interactions in forest understories using web-building spiders in four forest types: dry evergreen forest representing a natural control and three 20–30-year-old reforestation types, namely secondary naturally regenerating dry evergreen forest, monoculture reforestation dominated by Eucalyptus camaldulensis, and mixture reforestation dominated by Acacia mangium and E. camaldulensis. We collected spiders with their prey and measured the availability of potential prey. We also measured different spider traits (web type, body size) that can be selected by various forest types and consequently affect the predator–prey interactions. The forest type influenced the predator–prey interaction in a complex way, interactively affecting spider density and prey-specific capture efficacy of spider community. The forest type also influenced the web-type and body-size distributions of spiders. Surprisingly, the prey composition caught by spider webs was related only to the web-type but not to the spider mean body size. None of the studied reforestations have yet restored the natural predator–prey interactions, which indicates that conservation management in the tropics should focus on establishing protected areas in pristine regions instead of relying on reforestation. Moreover, the food-web models need to incorporate not only body sizes but also hunting strategies of predators to improve their predictive abilities.

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Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Nirun Pojprasat, Chaipat Wimolsuthikul, and Prapinya Siripaiboon for their help in the field. We are grateful to Nicole H. Cernohorsky for English editing. We would like to thank also to the editor Donald DeAngelis and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments that helped to improve our manuscript. This research was financially supported by the Specific University Research Fund of the FFWT Mendel University in Brno (Reg. Numbers: LDF_PSV_2017004 and LDF_TP_2020006).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forest Ecology, Faculty of Forestry and Wood Technology, Mendel University in Brno, Zemědělská 3, Brno, 613 00, Czech Republic

    Radek Michalko

  2. Department of Forest Protection and Wildlife Management, Faculty of Forestry and Wood Technology, Mendel University in Brno, Zemědělská 3, Brno, 613 00, Czech Republic

    Ondřej Košulič

  3. Department of Forest Biology, Faculty of Forestry, Kasetsart University, Bangkok, 10900, Thailand

    Prasit Wongprom, Chaowalit Songsangchote & Yongyut Trisurat

  4. Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, Prince of Songkla University, Songkhla, 90110, Thailand

    Venus Saksongmuang

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  1. Radek Michalko
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  4. Chaowalit Songsangchote
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  6. Yongyut Trisurat
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Correspondence to Radek Michalko.

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Additional information

The dataset can be found at https://zenodo.org/record/4312104; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4312104

Author Contributions

RM conceived the idea; RM, OK, PW, YT designed the study; RM, OK, CS, VS, PW performed the experiments; RM, OK, PW determined the material; RM analyzed the data; RM, OK wrote the ms; All authors read, commented, and approved the ms.

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Michalko, R., Košulič, O., Wongprom, P. et al. Reforestations of Tropical Forests Alter Interactions Between Web-Building Spiders and Their Prey. Ecosystems 24, 1962–1975 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-021-00627-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-021-00627-7

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