J. Manuel Vidal-Cordero

1 Introduction Ants, with almost 14,300 known species (Bolton 2024), occupy a wide range of habitats and play crucial ecological roles such as seed dispersal, organic matter decomposition, and even pollination, interacting with numerous organisms in their habitats (Del Toro et al. 2012; Schultheiss et al. 2022).

1 INTRODUCTION The interactions between birds and insects have been the subject of extensive research (Morse, 1971; Willis & Oniki, 1978). Bird-insect interactions in the form of predation, parasitism, and mutualism have received the most attention because of their ubiquitous occurrence and importance as study systems for understanding coevolution (Holmes et al., 1979; Maziarz et al., 2021; Price, 1997; Quinn & Ueta, 2008).

INTRODUCTION Insect communities associated with droppings can be very diverse, from specialist to more generalist or predatory species that colonise faecal deposits during the different stages of their decomposition (Sánchez Piñero & Avila, 2004).