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Video

10-Minute Paper

Plant-Insect Ecosystems

On-Demand

On-Demand 10-Minute Papers

No room to vibe: Vibrational acoustic niches constrain insect diversity

On-Demand
On-Demand
Global declines in insect diversity call for a better understanding of the factors shaping insect communities. Here, we investigate a potentially important, but unstudied, factor that could constrain local insect diversity – the vibrational acoustic niche. Over 93% of acoustic insects use substrate-borne vibrations (i.e. vibrational signals) to communicate. In contrast to airborne acoustic signals, vibrational signals travel through solid substrata, like plant stems and leaves.
Thus, the transmission properties of plants could limit the available vibrational niche space by constraining which vibrational signals transmit well, and therefore which insect species can use the plants. We tested whether vibrational signals differed across plants of different structural types— herbaceous, grass, woody, and vines – in prairies in the Saint Louis region. We first developed equipment for high throughput recording of vibrational signals, and then recorded hundreds of hours of vibrational signals from the four plant types. We analyzed the resulting sound files to identify the number unique signals on each plant, and then categorize the signals into four signal types: pulses, trains, harmonics, and complex. We tested whether signal diversity and signal types varied across the four plant structural types. We discuss how our research will assist in understanding the potential impacts of a relatively unexplored niche concept on local assemblages of insect communities.