the effects of biogeography on ant diversity and activity on the boston harbor islands, massachusetts, u.s.a生物地理学的影响蚂蚁多样性和活动在波士顿港岛屿,麻萨诸塞州,美国.pdfVIP

The Effects of Biogeography on Ant Diversity and Activity on the Boston Harbor Islands, Massachusetts, U.S.A. 1 2 2,3 Adam T. Clark *, Jessica J. Rykken , Brian D. Farrell 1 Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America, 2 Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America, 3 Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America Abstract Many studies have examined how island biogeography affects diversity on the scale of island systems. In this study, we address how diversity varies over very short periods of time on individual islands. To do this, we compile an inventory of the ants living in the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area, Boston, Massachusetts, USA using data from a five-year All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory of the region’s arthropods. Consistent with the classical theory of island biogeography, species richness increased with island size, decreased with island isolation, and remained relatively constant over time. Additionally, our inventory finds that almost half of the known Massachusetts ant fauna can be collected in the BHI, and identifies four new species records for Massachusetts, including one new to the United States, Myrmica scabrinodis. We find that the number of species actually active on islands depended greatly on the timescale under consideration. The species that could be detected during any given week of sampling could by no means account for total island species richness, even when correcting for sampling effort. Though we consistently collected the same number of species over any given week of sampling, the identities of those species varied greatly between weeks. This variation does not result fro