Arthropods association to plant sex
We collected a total of 1,961 arthropods in female and male trees ofB. cordata . From these arthropods, we identified 87 morphospecies in 15 different orders–the list of morphospecies is in Supplemental Materials III. We only considered adult morphospecies for the subsequent analyses. For arthropod abundance, we did not detect significant differences between plant sex (P=0.62); however, time and the interaction between sex*time had a significant effect on arthropod abundance (𝛘2=1488.9, P<0.0001 and 𝛘2=16.08, P=0.006 respectively). The highest abundance of arthropods was recorded during the first collection date decreasing with time (Fig 2 ). When we compared species richness by plant sex, 68 morphospecies were found in female plants and 72 in male plants, from which 53 species were shared between sexes, which corresponds to a 0.61% Jaccard’s similarity index. Then, according to Hill numbers, we did not detect differences on the effective number of species per plant sex (0D ) across time (Fig. 3 ). When we tested the exponential of Shannon’s entropy (1D ) and the inverse of Simpson’s index (2D ), they present an interesting reverse pattern. Diversity was higher in male plants for both metrics early in the season, then during the middle of the season they show no differences between sexes whereas by October-November both metrics display a reverse pattern, having females showing higher diversity and higher evenness (Fig. 3 ).
Sixty four out of 87 morphospecies found in this study were classified into a particular guild. These morphospecies contained 1,810 specimens (92% of all arthropods collected). When compared with at -student-paired test, neither herbivores nor carnivores showed significant differences (𝛘2=0.05, P=0.81; 𝛘2=0.14, P=0.70; Figure 4). When we evaluated richness per guild per time, again herbivores did not show significant differences between males and females at any time; however, carnivores did show significant differences in June and December. Indeed, more carnivores were found in male plants in June (𝛘2=4.98, d.f.= 1, P=0.02; Figure 4), then after five months we found a reverse pattern with more carnivore species found in female plants (𝛘2=3.94, d.f.= 1, P=0.04; Figure 4). Regarding detritivores, only seven morphospecies (24 individuals) were found in this guild, so a statistical analysis was not possible.