A comparison of ecomorphology between introduced and native Australian dung beetles
Alexander Harvey
A and Emma Sherratt A B *
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A School of Biological Sciences, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia.
B South Australian Museum, North Terrace, Adelaide, SA 5000, Australia.
Australian Journal of Zoology 70(4) 115-125 https://doi.org/10.1071/ZO22044
Submitted: 29 November 2022 Accepted: 23 February 2023 Published: 27 April 2023
© 2022 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)
Abstract
Among the many catastrophic introductions of exotic species to Australia, the Australian Dung Beetle Project stands apart as a success story. From 1965 dung beetles (Coleoptera: Scarabaeinae) were introduced for biological control purposes, and 23 species survived to become integrated into the environment with apparently little-to-no competition with native species. To understand this, we investigated ecomorphological diversity in the Australian dung beetle fauna, examining variation in functional traits among rolling and tunnelling species that are native to Australia and introduced. We found that introduced species are, on average, larger than native species of the same nidification strategy, but the size ranges overlap. Native and introduced tunnellers are convergent in body shape, whereas introduced rollers have distinct body shape compared with native species. Rollers and tunnellers also have distinct allometric patterns, where shape variation predicted by size aligns along two diverging allometric trajectories between nidification strategies. Our results suggest that ecomorphological differences do not explain the apparent lack of competition between tunnellers, but this may be the factor for rollers. Also, these results indicate that body size and associated allometric scaling is an important aspect of the ecomorphology of dung beetles that should be considered in future studies.
Keywords: convergence, diversity, dung beetles, ecomorphology, functional morphology, morphometrics, niche partitioning, Scarabaeinae.
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