Immatures could be matched to adults for many taxa, though could

Immatures could be matched to adults for many taxa, though could only be determined definitively to genus, family, or sometimes order for others. In most cases, for the purposes of density estimation, immatures

within a known taxon Trichostatin A manufacturer were assigned to species according to the relative densities of adults within that taxon. For example, if three species of Nysius seed bugs (Hemiptera: Lygaeidae) occurred in a plot, numbers of immature Nysius in that plot were allocated to these three species according to the proportional representation of the adults in that plot. In cases where immatures could only be identified to order or to families with many species (e.g., some Lepidoptera, Coleoptera and Araneae), these individuals were excluded from analyses, as were the unidentified Acari, Pseudococcidae and parasitic Hymenoptera. A total of 300 species or morphospecies from the five sites were identified with the help of many taxonomic Selonsertib specialists, and could be assigned as either endemic or introduced to the Hawaiian Islands according to Nishida (2002), other literature and specialist knowledge (Supplementary Tables 2 and 3). Additional identified taxa of ambiguous provenance were excluded from the analyses. All taxa are referred to hereafter as species. Voucher specimens are deposited at the Bernice P. Bishop Museum, the Essig Museum of Entomology,

the University of Hawaii Insect Museum and the Haleakala National Park Insect Collection. Some species occurred at more than one site, resulting in 442 species × site incidences, which served as the total dataset for the analyses. We assigned each species to one of three broad trophic roles (carnivore, herbivore, detritivore) based on reports in the literature. Very few species qualified as omnivores according to the definition of using both plant and prey resources (Coll and Guershon 2002), and these were excluded from regression analyses. The body size of each species

was represented by its biomass, which we estimated from mean body length measurements of adults and Interleukin-2 receptor immatures for each species using regression relationships of biomass on length (reported in Gruner 2003). The total number of individuals captured of each species in the uninvaded, reference area of each site (U in the terminology below) was used as an estimate of its relative population density. Impact of invasive ants We estimated the impact of invasive ants on arthropod species in two different ways, depending on GDC-0941 nmr whether the species was rare or not. We defined rare species as those that met the following two criteria: (1) the species occurred at a density of less than 5 individuals per total sampling effort in the combined uninvaded plots of a site, (2) this was true at each of the sites where the species was found.

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