Tropical trees as islands: Diversity accumulation of armored scale insects (Hemiptera: Diaspididae) on trees as a function of forest age

While armored scale insects (Hemiptera: Diaspididae) are well known from managed agricultural ecosystems, very little is known about their distribution, abundance, and diversity in natural habitats, including where they likely hit their peak diversity: tropical rainforest canopies. The temporal and spatial dynamics of armored scale insect populations in these settings are essentially unknown, but as extreme generalists with undirected dispersal, their abundance and biodiversity on individual trees in a tropical forest could be explained by principles derived from island biogeography theory: older established trees should boast a higher species diversity than younger ones. In this study, specimens were collected in an intensive survey from a tropical rainforest canopy using a canopy access crane in the Daintree Rainforest in Australia; a complementary survey was simultaneously performed on an adjacent five year-old reforestation plot that had a similar diversity and constituency as the mature plot. We use a combination of systematic environmental sampling and molecular and morphological species delimitation techniques to compare and contrast the abundance, diversity, and community phylogenetics of these two habitats in order to address this question.