Invasion of the coccinellid community associated with a tropical annual agroecosystem

Detailed understanding of the mechanisms enabling or limiting impacts invasive generalist predators is needed. Harmonia axyridis an coccinellid predator that may have destabilised communities worldwide and excellent candidate for investigating invasion dynamics. We evaluated four hypotheses: (1) Nine years after being detected in Central Brazil, Ha. has dominated community. This facilitated by (2) its broader aphid prey range than other aphidophagous coccinellids, (3) superiority as asymmetrical intraguild predator, (4) invasibility present sampled invertebrate associated with six organic vegetable farms Brazil during 2017 2018, conducted a feeding trial to measure niche breadth overlap, estimated intra- interspecific interaction strengths corresponding first-order Lotka-Volterra parameters evaluate strength predation create community matrix. found comprised ≤8.3% Hi. convergens had broadest axyridis. could not determine from population data if was dominant because density too low constant. The matrix indicated present-day stable. conclude become part it does stable perturbation