Diversidade funcional da comunidade de cupins (Blattaria: Isoptera) ao longo de gradientes ambientais em uma floresta de terra firme da Amazônia Central, com notas taxonômicas para o grupo Capritermes

Abstract

Different environmental variables may be responsible for the distribution of species along a gradient. This substitution process may occur by competition, environmental filtering and other ecological process that may lead to changes on morphological characters among species that inhabit same locality or changes in its distribution. One of the objectives of this study was to verify if gradient induced by phosphorus concentration, clay percentage and litter depth were modelling the functional distribution of termite’s community. To answer this objective, it was measured ten functional traits from 54 species of termites: length, width and height of the head, width of mandibles basis, length of the nasus, width and length of pronotum, length of tibia and femur. The entire samples were collected in 2008 and 2009 and were at Laboratório de Sistemática e Ecologia de Invertebrados de Solo, on Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia. These traits were correlated with environmental variables by mixed analysis. The results exhibit a significative relation between some traits measured with clay percentage and litter depth. However, there was no relation with phosphorous concentration on soil. The obtained results may suggest that litter depth and clay percentage affects locomotion and the lifestyle of the species, while other character not measured may be associated with species adaptation to the use of the phosphorous. In addition to the work mentioned above, it was elaborated three taxonomic notes for the Capritermes-group. This group is represented by four genera, Planicapritermes, Neocapritermes, Cornicapritermes and Dihoplotermes. On this work, it was proposed a new genus and species, Duckecapritermes falcifer sp. nov.; two new species for the genera Cornicapritermes, C. ufam sp. nov. and C. maracaensis sp. nov., which was monotypic, and was described the imago of Neocapritermes utiariti.