Conclusion
The combination of major dietary shifts driven by non-native taxa and the high prevalence of parasite reads from spiders in ginger sites, gives support to the idea that heavily invaded habitat could function as a sink, rather than a source, environment for endemic taxa. Because spider diets tend to reflect not only the diversity of insect prey in a given habitat but also the choice of the spider (Cuff et al.2021), the spiders are showing not only how the arthropod composition changes with ginger invasion, but also how spiders are responding to environmental shifts. The high density of non-native taxa and the increases in both parasitoid wasps and entomopathogenic fungi clearly demonstrates that the sites modified by plant invasion are associated with a transformation of the arthropod community. The importance of this work is in highlighting how entire communities, and the associated interactions, are modified by a single invasive species. These introduced species do not function as reservoirs – or “safe havens” – for native taxa. Rather, they may act as “sinks”, drawing native taxa into the transformed environment lacking native prey and exposing species to higher levels of parasitism. Cascading effects of ecosystem alteration and the restructuring of biotic interactions may contribute to extinction debt in invaded systems, where the full consequences of invasion do not become evident for many years (Kuussaari et al.2009).