New Publication: Do ants defend honey-dew producing hemipterans from their parasitoids?
The relationship between phloem-feeding insects, like aphids, and “shepherd” ants is a paradigmatical example of mutualism in almost every Ecology textbook. However, the knowledge about how ants defend honey-dew producing hemipterans from their major enemies – parasitoids – is scarce and dispersed. Ángel Plata and their colleagues from IVIA-Valencia develop an outstanding and comprehensive review to tackle this issue.…
New Publication: Bees matter for apple pollination all over the world, especially wild ones
The relevance of pollinators for food production is widely accepted, but we still lack of information on many global crops. Within a big team led by Maxime Eeraerts, we review the current evidence of pollination in apple, a major fruit crop across the world. We found a consistent pattern of pollen limitation in crops of different territories and latitudes,…
New Publication: Who eats blueberry crops? Mostly wild boars and blackbirds, and sometimes affecting yield
Blueberry crops are an attractive and easy-to-eat resource for wild vertebrates, which may ultimately decrease crop yields by intense frugivory. In this new study, a part of Javi Jiménez-Albarral’s PhD, we analyse the patterns of blueberry consumption by wild vertebrates in orchards in northern Spain, estimating experimentally the actual effects on crop yield. By using direct observation and camera…
New Publication: Insectivorous birds provide ecosystem services, but also disservices, to apple farmers
Insectivorous birds are known to provide essential services of pest control in agroecosystems, but they may also prey on arthropods acting as natural enemies, like spiders, leading to an ecosystem disservice derived from intraguild predation. Here, we used DNA-metabarcoding to characterize the diet of different insectivororus bird species in apple orchards in Asturias. We estimated the trade-offs between ecosystem…
New Publication: Do birds connect different ecosystem services in croplands?
In our recent research, we used DNA-metabarcoding and ecological networks to show how birds link pest control in apple orchards in N Spain with seed dispersal in the surrounding hedgerows. We found that pest control network, which emerges from the antagonistic interactions between birds and apple pests, was highly modular and more specialized. This suggests strong trophic complementarity between…
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Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Lab 