Effects of climate change on subterranean termite territory size: A simulation study
1Division of Fusion and Convergence of Mathematical Sciences, National Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Daejeon, South Korea
2Department of Biological Sciences, Pusan National University, Busan (Pusan), South Korea
Abstract
In order to study how climate change affects the territory size of subterranean termites, a lattice model was used to simulate the foraging territory of the Formosan subterranean termite, Coptotermes formosanus Shiraki (Isoptera: Rhinotermitidae), and the minimized local rules that are based on empirical data from the development of termites’ foraging territory was applied. A landscape was generated by randomly assigning values ranging from 0.0 to 1.0 to each lattice site, which represented the spatially distributed property of the landscape. At the beginning of the simulation run, N territory seeds - one for each founding pair, were randomly distributed on the lattice space. The territories grew during the summer and shrank during the winter. In the model, the effects of climate change were demonstrated by changes in two variables: the period of the summer season, T, and the percentage of the remaining termite cells, σ , after the shrinkage. The territory size distribution was investigated in the size descending order for the values of T (= 10, 15, ... , 50) and σ (= 10, 15, ... , 50) at a steady state after a sufficiently long time period. The distribution was separated into two regions: the larger-sized territories and the smaller-sized territories. The slope, m, of the distribution of territory size on a semi-log scale for the larger-sized territories was maximal with T (45 ≤ T ≤ 50) in the maximal range and with σ in the optimal range (30 ≤ σ ≤ 40), regardless of the value of N. The results suggest that the climate change can influence the termite territory size distribution under the proper balance of T and σ in combination.
Keywords: insecticide, toxicity, Rajasthan, Gujarat
Correspondence:
a sunchaos@nims.re.kr,
b* tschon@pusan.ac.kr, *Corresponding author
Abbreviation: SOM, self-organizing map
Received: 16 May 2010 | Accepted: 8 March 2011 | Published: 1 July 2011
Copyright: This is an open access paper. We use the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license that permits unrestricted use, provided that the paper is properly attributed.
ISSN: 1536-2442 | Volume 11, Number 80
Lee S-H, Chon T-S. 2011. Effects of climate change on subterranean termite territory size: A simulation study. Journal of Insect Science 11:80 available online: insectscience.org/11.80
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