Journal
ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
Volume 7, Issue 18, Pages 7527-7533Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/ece3.3275
Keywords
insectivorous; insects; invertebrate sampling; prey availability; time lapse
Categories
Funding
- Australian Research Council [FTll0100191]
- Australian Government's National Environmental Science Programme - Threatened Species Recovery Hub
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Pitfall trapping is the standard technique to estimate activity and relative abundance of leaf litter arthropods. Pitfall trapping is not ideal for long-term sampling because it is lethal, labor-intensive, and may have taxonomic sampling biases. We test an alternative sampling method that can be left in place for several months at a time: verticallyplaced time-lapse camera traps that have a short focal distance, enabling identification of small arthropods. We tested the effectiveness of these time-lapse cameras, and quantified escape and avoidance behavior of arthropod orders encountering pitfall traps by placing cameras programed with a range of sampling intervals above pitfalls, to assess numerical, taxonomic, and body size differences in samples collected by the two methods. Cameras programed with 1- or 15-min intervals recorded around twice as many arthropod taxa per day and a third more individuals per day than pitfall traps. Hymenoptera (ants), Embioptera (webspinners), and Blattodea (cockroaches) frequently escaped from pitfalls so were particularly under-sampled by them. The time-lapse camera method effectively samples litter arthropods to collect long-term data. It is standardized, non-lethal, and does not alter the substrate or require frequent visits.
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