We participated in a global experiment aimed at researching the effect of shelters (rolled leaves) on arthropods. Four team members of the insect ecology group (Michal Knapp, Tomáš Kadlec, Ezequiel González and Tiit Teder) participated in this investigation, which was coordinated by Gustavo Romero from Brazil. By means of a manipulative experiment, specifically by artificially creating rolls from leaves (which is commonly done by some caterpillars in nature), we showed that such shelters are subsequently preferred by other groups of arthropods. A paper recently published in the journal of Global Change Biology shows (here: https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16150) that predators prefer these shelters independent of climate conditions, but herbivores use them depending on environmental conditions. Most of them will hide when there are many predators around and at higher temperatures. A by-product of the collaboration was another article published in the journal Ecology (here: https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.3639), which presents the dataset summarizing all the available data on the use of shelters created by arthropods across the world.
