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Dragonflies often engage in aggressive interactions over access to mates, food, or other resources. We should expect species to have behavioral adaptations for minimizing such interactions with other species because they are not competing with them for mates and often require different resources. We conducted observational trials in natural water pools that provide new evidence for one such adaptation in the Neotropical dragonfly, Micrathyria atra: males in this species have shorter interactions with individuals of other species than with conspecifics. 

Abstract Duration and temporal stability of resource subsidy largely affect the response of recipient communities. Factors that influence the temporal dynamics of resource subsidy from aquatic‐to‐terrestrial habitats by emerging aquatic insects were examined in this study. By measuring the flux of aquatic insect emergence from six habitats in a river over summer, we found that the timing of emergence varied by habitats for each dominant taxa, and that different species emerged at different times of the summer sequentially. We found that spatial variation in the emergence timing caused by the spatial heterogeneity of the water temperature, and so on in the source habitat can temporally stabilize the subsidy of each species from the whole river. Similarly, we found that the variation in emergence timing between species contributed to the temporal stability of subsidies from each habitat. The contribution of spatial heterogeneity to the temporal stability varied by the focal species and the contribution of species diversity varied by habitats. This study demonstrates how the ecological function of spatial heterogeneity and species diversity crosses the boundary of ecosystems by temporally stabilizing resource subsidies.