IMp: The customizable LEGO® Pinned Insect Manipulator
Abstract We present a pinned insect manipulator (IMp) constructed of LEGO® building bricks with two axes of movement and two axes of rotation. In addition we present three variants of the IMp to emphasise the modular design, which facilitates resizing to meet the full range of pinned insect specimens, is fully customizable, collapsible, affordable and does not require specialist tools or knowledge to assemble.
Functional differences stabilize beetle communities by weakening interspecific temporal synchrony.
The temporal stability of communities is essential for the maintenance of ecosystem functioning across trophic levels. The stabilizing effect of biodiversity is, among other factors, modulated by the level of synchrony in population fluctuations among the species in the community. What drives community synchrony, however, remains largely unclear. Community synchrony can be affected by external drivers such as disturbances, but also by the properties of the community. Species with different ecological strategies should fluctuate less synchronously than more similar species; thus, an increase in diversity of ecological strategies should decrease synchrony, and increase the stability of the community. Here, using an exceptionally large data set of ground beetle trappings in Dutch heathlands (~370,000 individuals in 19 plots, each sampled between 9 and 36 yr), we assess the drivers of community stability and synchrony, and their relationship with disturbance, species richness, and functional diversity (FD). We found no effect of disturbance (fire and topsoil removal) on community stability or synchrony, probably because of unpredictable patterns of increase or decrease of the populations. Community synchrony was overall positive, giving more support for independent and positive correlation between species than for compensatory dynamics. Synchrony decreased with increasing FD, but not with species richness. Supporting this, we found that the more species pairs differ in their traits, the less synchronously their populations fluctuate, where 74% of all pairs showed no significant correlation. Significant positive synchrony (19% of species pairs) was concentrated among pairs with low trait dissimilarity, and the 7% of pairs with significant negative temporal correlation showed no relation with pairwise functional dissimilarity. The stabilizing effect of FD via decreased synchrony supports largely untested theoretical expectations that an increased diversity of functional strategies in a community will have a stabilizing effect on community abundance. We hypothesize that because competition is low in this community, the stabilizing effect of FD reflects interspecific variation in responses to environmental fluctuations rather than competition.
Taxonomical Notes on Neotrichoporoides bulgaricus Graham, 1987 (Hymenoptera, Eulophidae)
Girault (1913a) erected the genus Neotrichoporoides with N. uniguttatus Girault, 1913 as the type species from Australia (Queensland). It was considered to be a monotypic Australian genus until 1986. Most species placed in this genus up to date were described by Girault (1913b; 1915) from Australia (18 species), by Graham (1986; 1987) from Europe (10 species), by Narendran et al. (2006) from India (6 species), and by Kostjukov (2004) and Yegorenkova & Kostjukov (2006) from Russia, Turkmenistan and Algeria (8 species). Currently, the Neotrichoporoides is represented by about 62 species worldwide (Noyes, 2009). So far, five species of Neo trichoporoides are known from Bulgaria: N. bulgaricus Graham, 1987, N. cavigena Graham, 1987, N. mediterraneus Graham, 1986, N. szelenyii (Erdos, 1951) and N. viri dimaculatus (Fullaway, 1955) (Graham, 1987; Boyadzhiev, 1999, 2004). In 2006 and 2008, three males of N. bulgaricus were collected. Because the species was described and is known so far only from females, a description of the male is provided here. The opportunity is taken to present further characters which were not mentioned in the original description.