PARENT SESSION
Contributed Oral Session 8: Invertebrate Ecology: Butterflies; Soil Insects
Monday, August 8, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 518 C, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal

Spatial aggregation of soil-feeding termites in primary and logged over forest in Malaysia.

Donovan, Sarah^*,1, Griffiths, Georgianne^{1, 2}, Homathevi, Rahman³, Winder, Linton⁴, ¹ University of Plymouth, Plymouth, Devon, UK² Rothamsted Research, Harpenden, Herts, UK³ Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia⁴ University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji

ABSTRACT- Soil feeding termites are abundant in lowland tropical rainforests and perform a large number of important soil processes including regulating nutrient availability and the stimulation of microbial activity. Plant successional recovery following disturbance is known to be closely linked to soil conditions; consequently, perturbations to the distribution of these termites as a result of forest disturbance will have implications for spatial patterns of termite-mediated soil processes, including forest regeneration. We examined the distribution of soil-feeding termites in primary and logged-over lowland dipterocarp forest in Sabah, Malaysia. Spatially referenced counts of soil-feeding termites, earthworms (which perform broadly similar ecological functions) and ten recorded environmental variables were described and compared using SADIE (SpAtial Distance by IndicEs). Soil-feeding termites showed strongly aggregated distributions in both primary and logged-over forest. These spatial patterns were associated with the distribution of canopy gaps in primary forest and depth of the humus layer in the logged site. Earthworms were patchily distributed in the primary forest, but there was no association between earthworm and termite occurrence at either site. We also discuss the appropriate sampling scale for detecting spatial patterns in this group, and the difficulties of investigating spatial distribution in a social insect.

Key words: Isoptera, Soil, Spatial distribution, Tropical rainforest