Bison are considered ecosystem engineers because of their grazing and physical disturbance to grassland communities. One of their behaviors that profoundly changes grassland communities is wallowing. This behavior creates high disturbance depressions that contain a distinctly different plant community compared to surrounding prairie, but how this heterogeneity affects consumers is less well understood. In this study, we investigated the effect of bison (Bison bison) wallows on the arthropod community structure in a tallgrass prairie. Four times during one growing season, we sampled fifteen wallows and fifteen adjacent prairie plots to determine the arthropod community structure. Collected arthropods were classified according to trophic position and morphospecies, and we compared abundance and diversity patterns between wallows and less disturbed prairie
Results/Conclusions
The arthropod community structure varied during the growing season. Repeated measures MANOVA indicated that herbivorous arthropods were less abundant and diverse in wallows, while carnivorous and detritivorous arthropod abundance and diversity were not statistically different between treatments. Canonical correspondence analysis showed that the wallows and surrounding prairie plots were distinctly different. These results support the idea that bison wallows represent unique habitat and that bison wallowing behaviour increases habitat heterogeneity and promotes maintenance of biodiversity in grasslands.