Annual precipitation predicts the phylogenetic signal in bat-fruit interaction networks across the Neotropics.

Closely related species tend to be more similar than randomly selected species from the same phylogenetic tree. This pattern, known as a phylogenetic signal, has been extensively studied for intrinsic (e.g. morphology), as well as extrinsic (e.g. climatic preferences), properties but less so for ecological interactions. Phylogenetic signals of species interactions (i.e. resource use) can vary across time and space, but the causes behind such variations across broader spatial extents remain elusive. Here, we evaluated how current and historical climates influence phylogenetic signals of bat-fruit interaction networks across the Neotropics. We performed a model selection relating the phylogenetic signals of each trophic level (bats and plants) with a set of current and historical climatic factors deemed ecologically important in shaping biotic interactions. Bat and plant phylogenetic signals in bat-fruit interaction networks varied little with climatic factors, although bat phylogenetic signals positively covaried with annual precipitation. These findings indicated that water availability could increase resource availability, favouring higher niche partitioning of trophic resources among bat species and hence bat phylogenetic signals across bat-fruit interaction networks. Overall, our study advances our understanding of the spatial dynamics of bat-fruit interactions by highlighting the association of current climatic factors with phylogenetic patterns of biotic interactions.

Mexico ants: incidence and abundance along the Nearctic-Neotropical interface.

Mexico is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, with an important proportion of endemism mainly because of the convergence of the Nearctic and Neotropical biogeographic regions, which generate great diversity and species turnover at different spatial scales. However, most of our knowledge of the Mexican ant biota is limited to a few well-studied taxa, and we lack a comprehensive synthesis of ant biodiversity information. For instance, most of the knowledge available in the literature on Mexican ant fauna refers only to species lists by states, or is focused on only a few regions of the country, which prevents the study of several basic and applied aspects of ants, from diversity and distribution to conservation. Our aims in this data paper are therefore (1) to compile all the information available regarding ants across the Mexican territory, and (2) to identify major patterns in the gathered data set and geographic gaps in order to direct future sampling efforts. All records were obtained from raw data, including both unpublished and published information. After exhaustive filtering and updating information and synonyms, we compiled a total of 21,731 records for 887 ant species distributed throughout Mexico from 1894 to 2018. These records were concentrated mainly in the states of Chiapas (n = 6,902, 32.76%) and Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave (n = 4,329, 19.92%), which together comprise half the records. The subfamily with the highest number of records was Myrmicinae (n = 10,458 records, 48.12%), followed by Formicinae (n = 3,284, 15.11%) and Ponerinae (n = 1,914, 8.8%). Most ant records were collected in the Neotropical region of the country (n = 12,646, 58.19%), followed by the Mexican transition zone (n = 5,237, 24.09%) and the Nearctic region (n = 3,848, 17.72%). Native species comprised 95.46% of the records (n = 20,745). To the best of our knowledge, this is the most complete data set available to date in the literature for the country. We hope that this compilation will encourage researchers to explore different aspects of the population and community research of ants at different spatial scales, and to aid in the establishment of conservation policies and actions. There are no copyright restrictions. Please cite this data paper when using its data for publications or teaching events.

The risk of use small matrices to measure specialization in host-parasite interaction networks: a comment to Rivera-García et al. (2016).

In the last years, there were a growing number of studies using the metric H 2' to calculate complementary specialization in host-parasite interaction networks. However, only a few studies have explored the sensitivity of H 2' to network dimensions (i.e. species richness and number of interactions), which consequently could generate studies that are not comparable among them or lead to biased conclusions. In this study, we used the recent published study conducted by Rivera-García et al. in 2016 involving host-bat fly networks as an example to call attention to the risk of using H 2' to calculate specialization for small matrices. After conducting analyses based on both empirical and simulated data, we show that H 2' values are strongly affected by randomly allocation of species interactions to another cell in the matrix for small networks and that therefore the results and conclusions presented in Rivera-García et al. in 2016 are only an artefact of the dataset used. Therefore, we fully recommended taking into account the careful use of small networks to measuring specialization in host-parasite interactions.