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Pitfall trap diagram2/25/2023 ![]() As a result, many ant inventories employ more than one sampling technique, as their use in combination often increases sampling efficiency. ĭiverse methodologies have been used to collect ants, and each of them has its own limitations given that no single method is able to collect all species inhabiting a given area (at least not in tropical and subtropical habitats where ant diversity is typically high), since these species commonly have a wide diversity of foraging and nesting habits. Due to these characteristics, ants have been commonly used as a focal taxon in biodiversity studies or as bioindicators in studies of land management. Ants play important ecological roles, acting as herbivores, seed dispersers or, commonly, as predators and scavengers of other arthropods. Ants are a particularly important group of arthropods as they are highly abundant and diverse, have a wide geographic distribution, and occupy a variety of niches. In both cases a more efficient inventory is commonly achieved with the use of diverse and complementary sampling techniques, and this is especially true with regard to hyperdiverse groups such as terrestrial arthropods. Introductionīiodiversity inventories seek a characterization of the studied community or the elaboration of a complete species list. Sampling completeness increased very little using a combination of conventional and subterranean traps than using just conventional traps. Furthermore, subterranean traps captured far fewer species in total than conventional traps (75 versus 220 species), and this was true in all three habitats sampled. Surprisingly, however, subterranean and conventional traps were similarly efficient at capturing cryptobiotic species. Sixteen percent of the species collected in subterranean traps were unique, and most of these had cryptobiotic morphology (i.e., were truly hypogaeic species). ![]() Sampling duration, soil depth, and sprinkling vegetal oil around traps all tended to affect the number of species found in subterranean traps. We collected ants in forests, savannas, and crops in central Brazil using subterranean pitfall traps and conventional pitfall traps placed on the soil surface. The use of subterranean traps is a relatively novel method to sample ants, and few studies have evaluated its performance relative to other methods. ![]()
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