MACROECOLOGY OF ANURANS-PREY NETWORKS

Food-webs play a central role in the study of biological communities, describing the feeding habits of a set of organisms. We built based on literature a globally database of trophic anuran assemblages and calculated network metrics to describe the network structure. We compiled a total of 55 weighted anuran-prey interaction networks, which 39 networks are located in tropical region and 16 networks in temperate region. Anuran richness ranged from three to 64 species, and the prey richness ranged from four to 30 categories. Among the 51 categories of prey, 43 belong to Arthropods filo. Coleoptera was the most frequent category and Formicidae was the most abundant, followed by termites. The temperate and tropical food-webs networks showed similar macroecological patterns. Both regions presented high connectance, no nestedness and low modularity and complementary specialization. Our study indicates that the compilation of global data’s on anuran diet can provide novel and useful information on predator-prey networks, and is the first integrated analysis of structural patterns of networks between anurans-preys quantified in different parts of the world.