Dung Beetle-Mammal Dung Interaction Networks are Resilient Across a Gradient of Forest Disturbance

Catharsius sp. dung beetles feeding on dung in a tropical forest in Sabah, Malaysia. Photo Nichar Gregory

In Dr Chiew Li Yuen’s first paper from her PhD, "Dung Beetle-Mammal Dung Interaction Networks are Resilient Across a Gradient of Forest Disturbance", she and her colleagues published the first dung beetle-mammal dung feeding networks across a land-use gradient in Borneo. Interestingly, these networks appeared to be relatively robust to forest disturbance caused by logging and forest fragmentation, but dung beetle species were lost in highly disturbed forests and plantations and the networks became simplified. As mammal diversity changed little across the gradient and dung beetles were found to be fairly generalist in their dung preferences these changes in network structure are thought to be driven by habitat changes, such as increasing temperatures in disturbed areas.

Read more about this study in this blog post by #StoryBehindThePaper with Animal Ecology in Focus by Chiew Li Yuen and Dr. Eleanor Slade here. Check out the paper and its exciting results here: https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.13655