Mirmecofauna como indicador de qualidade de ambiente em áreas de roçados

Abstract

Ants are eussocial insects grouped within a single family (Formicidae), which contains 17 subfamilies and 333 genres. Bioindicators are living organisms or biological processes used to assess environmental impacts and monitor the recovery of the environment. Formicid communities are ecologically important for interacting with other organisms at all trophic levels, and can potentially be used as bioindicators for having high species abundance and richness, wide geographic distribution and can be easily sampled. The objective was to evaluate the potential bioindicator of ants in areas with different types of swidden management. The treatments consisted of different capoeira management strategies for planting gardens, and five sample units (sub-plots), described as: T1 - Traditional clearing (cutting and burning), T2 - enriched clearing (legume planting at the end of agricultural use); T3 - Alley system (legume planting in rows with crop strips); T4 - cleared with native vegetation strip (maintenance of capoeira in strips interspersed with cultivation strip) and T5 - cleared without fire (opening the area, however without burning). The individuals were collected with the aid of the Provid trap. 68 species of ants were identified, distributed in 17 genera and 5 subfamilies, with emphasis on the subfamily Myrmicinae, which presented the largest number of species. Ectatomma muticum was the species with the highest number of records, Solenopsis sp.1, Solenopsis sp. 2, Solenopsis sp. 3 and Solenopsis sp. 5 obtained greater dominance and Pheidole sp. 1, Pheidole sp. 2, Pheidole sp. 3, Pheidole sp. 4, Pheidole sp. 5, Pheidole sp. 6, Pheidole sp. 7, Pheidole sp. 8, Pheidole sp. 9, Pheidole sp. 10 and Pheidole sp. 11 had the largest number of species. The effect of the treatments on the abundance of ants was significant (F (4.16) = 2.8538; p = 0.000325), where the Alley System (T3) differed significantly from the others, presenting the highest abundance of ants, showing that the importance of the presence of legumes. It was observed that there was no significant correlation between the abundance of ants and the climatic variables accumulated rainfall, average air temperature and relative humidity