Abstract
Understanding the relative contributions of biotic and abiotic factors to community structure remains a fundamental aim of community ecology. Dytiscid beetles, which occur in a diverse set of aquatic habitats and display considerable variation in their abundance and composition among locales, would appear to be a model system for investigating such questions. Here, we present an overview of investigations into community structure in dytiscids, which reveals that they are understudied relative to their typically high abundance in ditches to bogs to lakes. We discuss emergent trends in the co-occurrence of dytiscids with regard to ecological and phylogenetic similarity, briefly present some investigations into the influence of dispersal on community structure, and discuss some prospects for future progress in this area.
Keywords
What governs the nature of natural communities? This question has generated much interest among biologists. The major conclusion to come out of the considerable research conducted on the questions seems to be that there is no simple answer.
Larson 1990
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to D. A. Yee for the opportunity to contribute a chapter to this volume, E. Bowles, J. Mee, S. Rogers and other members of the RV* lab group at the University of Calgary for feedback on an earlier version of the manuscript, and to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada for continued support of our research on dytiscids.
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Vamosi, S.M., Wohlfahrt, B. (2014). Community Patterns in Dytiscids. In: Yee, D. (eds) Ecology, Systematics, and the Natural History of Predaceous Diving Beetles (Coleoptera: Dytiscidae). Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9109-0_10
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