| Climate change impact on neotropical social wasps. Auteur(s) : Dejean, Alain Céréghino, Régis Carpenter, James M Corbara, Bruno Hérault, Bruno Rossi, Vivien Leponce, Maurice Orivel, Jérome Auteurs secondaires : Ecologie des forêts de Guyane (ECOFOG) ; Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD) - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) - Université des Antilles et de la Guyane (UAG) - AgroParisTech - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Laboratoire Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Environnement - ECOLAB (ECOLAB) ; Institut National Polytechnique [Toulouse] (INP) - Université Paul Sabatier - Toulouse 3 (UPS) - Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées (OMP) - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Division of Invertebrate Zoology, American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, New York 10024, USA ; Division of Invertebrate Zoology, American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, New York 10024, USA Laboratoire Microorganismes : Génome et Environnement (LMGE) ; Université Blaise Pascal - Clermont-Ferrand 2 (UBP) - Université d'Auvergne - Clermont-Ferrand I (UdA) - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Université des Antilles et de la Guyane (UAG) Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD) Institut Royal des Sciences Naturelles de Belgique, 1000 Brussels, Belgium. ; Institut Royal des Sciences Naturelles de Belgique, 1000 Brussels, Belgium. Ecologie et Ecophysiologie Forestières (EEF) ; Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) - Université de Lorraine (UL) Éditeur(s) : HAL CCSD Public Library of Science Résumé : International audience Establishing a direct link between climate change and fluctuations in animal populations through long-term monitoring is difficult given the paucity of baseline data. We hypothesized that social wasps are sensitive to climatic variations, and thus studied the impact of ENSO events on social wasp populations in French Guiana. We noted that during the 2000 La Niña year there was a 77.1% decrease in their nest abundance along ca. 5 km of forest edges, and that 70.5% of the species were no longer present. Two simultaneous 13-year surveys (1997-2009) confirmed the decrease in social wasps during La Niña years (2000 and 2006), while an increase occurred during the 2009 El Niño year. A 30-year weather survey showed that these phenomena corresponded to particularly high levels of rainfall, and that temperature, humidity and global solar radiation were correlated with rainfall. Using the Self-Organizing Map algorithm, we show that heavy rainfall during an entire rainy season has a negative impact on social wasps. Strong contrasts in rainfall between the dry season and the short rainy season exacerbate this effect. Social wasp populations never recovered to their pre-2000 levels. This is probably because these conditions occurred over four years; heavy rainfall during the major rainy seasons during four other years also had a detrimental effect. On the contrary, low levels of rainfall during the major rainy season in 2009 spurred an increase in social wasp populations. We conclude that recent climatic changes have likely resulted in fewer social wasp colonies because they have lowered the wasps' resistance to parasitoids and pathogens. These results imply that Neotropical social wasps can be regarded as bio-indicators because they highlight the impact of climatic changes not yet perceptible in plants and other animals. ISSN: 1932-6203 hal-00825825 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00825825 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00825825/document https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00825825/file/Dejean2011_Climate.pdf DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0027004 | Partager
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