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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article

Front. Ecol. Evol.
Sec. Conservation and Restoration Ecology
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fevo.2024.1439859

Chironomid sentinel cards: an easy-to-apply method for assessing predation rate in freshwater (agro)ecosystems

Provisionally accepted
  • Institute of Agrifood Research and Technology (IRTA), Barcelona, Spain

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Global change is eroding freshwater biodiversity at higher rates than in any other ecosystem, potentially entailing a parallel degradation of ecosystem functions such as the predation function. However, the relationships between biodiversity and predation effectiveness remain poorly explored in freshwater ecosystems, largely due to the unavailability of easy-to-apply methods that allow to characterize the predation function under real-field conditions. Here we proposed the chironomid sentinel cards as a fast, reliable, and standardized method to estimate predation rates in aquatic ecosystems. Briefly, by easily gluing chironomid larvae to a plastic card and offering them to aquatic predators during a timelapse we can quantify removal rates, and hence the predation function. As an indicator of the usefulness of the method, we additionally assessed whether the use of chironomid sentinel cards allows to link the estimated predation rates to three descriptors of predator assemblages: i) taxa richness, ii) Hill evenness, and iii) abundance of aquatic predators. We combined a thorough sampling of aquatic macroinvertebrate predators with a large deployment of chironomid sentinel cards across 12 flooded rice fields throughout the rice phenological cycle. Our results show that the three biodiversity indexes were positively related to the predation rate estimates, highlighting the sensibility of the method to changes in predator assemblages. We therefore conclude that the methodology is suitable to assess potential biodiversity-predation links under field aquatic conditions. We advocate to use the chironomid sentinel cards as an easy-to-apply, fast, and standardized method that allows comparisons of predation effectiveness across different shallow freshwater ecosystems.

    Keywords: Aquatic predators, Biodiversity, Ecosystem functioning, natural enemies, macroinvertebrates, Pest Control, rice, wetlands

    Received: 28 May 2024; Accepted: 08 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Pérez-Méndez, Echeverría-Progulakis, Llevat, Alcaraz, Martinez-Eixarch and Catala-Forner. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Néstor Pérez-Méndez, Institute of Agrifood Research and Technology (IRTA), Barcelona, Spain

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.