Metacommunity theory is a convenient framework in which to investigate how local communities linked by dispersal influence patterns of species distribution and abundance across large spatial scales. For organisms with complex life cycles such as mosquitoes, different pressures are expected to act on communities due to behavioral and ecological partitioning of life stages. Adult females select habitats for oviposition, and resulting offspring are confined to that habitat until reaching adult stages capable of flight; outside-container effects (i.e., spatial factors) are thus expected to act more strongly on species distributions as a function of adult dispersal capability, which should be limited by geographic distances between sites. However, larval community dynamics within a habitat are influenced by inside-container effects, mainly interactions with conspecifics and heterospecifics (e.g., through effects of competition and predation). We predicted that because mosquito immatures are confined to the aquatic habitat and only adults disperse, inside container effects (e.g., predation, competition) would influence community structure more than outside container effects (e.g., environmental and spatial factors).
Results/Conclusions
We found a temporal influence on both prey mosquito and predator community structure, and the changes in prey mosquito species composition over time appear to be driven by changes in predator abundances. There was a negligible effect of spatial and environmental factors on mosquito community structure, and temporal effects on mosquito abundances and distributions appear to be driven by changes in abundance of the dominant predator, perhaps because inside container effects are stronger than outside-container effects due to larval habitat restriction, or because adult dispersal is not limited at the chosen spatial scales.