2009
--Mike and Natalie are co-authors, along with Steve Yanoviak, May Yuan, and Robert Dudley, on a PNAS paper Sodium shortage as a constraint on the carbon cycle in an inland tropical rainforest. This gets a nice writeup in National Geograhic Online.
--Sooner Magazine has a nice writeup of the Lab's work, with many illustrations from Debby Kaspari
--NSF Ecosystems funds the lab to the tune of $75K to perform large scale fertilization of an Ecuador rainforest, with NaCl!
--Insectes Sociaux publishes a collaboration between Jon and Mike on lifespans of male alates.
--Mike, Natalie, and David head to Barro Colorado Island to study ants, trophic ecology, biodiversity, decomposition, and other heady stuff.
-- Jon earns a OU Biology Station Scholarship to work on metabolic scaling in ants, and heads to the OU Biology station for a summer of field work.
--Bert Hoelldobler visits the lab as part of EEB Spring 2009. Copious discussion, two great lectures and presenting his film "Ants: Nature's secret power" kept Bert busy.
--Mike, Natalie, Debby Kaspari and Steve Yanoviak work at the ACTS station over Xmas break continuing our studies of the biogeography of salt. More from this soon...
--NSF Ecology funds Mike's grant with Adam Kay to study the stoichiometric underpinnings of ant life history and community ecology on BCI. This includes support for two grad students, and will keep us busy on the island for three years. Huzzah!

2008
--Mike and Brad Stevenson speculate as to what Microbiologists can learn from behavioral ecologists in the PNAS commentary: Evolutionary Ecology, antibiosis, and all that rot.
--Mike celebrates the 50th anniversary of RH MacArthur's "warbler paper" in the Bulletin of the ESA
--Ants like Salt! The media hysteria reaches fever pitch as PNAS publishes an article by Kaspari, Yanoviak and Dudley on the biogeography of salt limitation across ant communities.
--As part of a continuing effort to get pictorial guides to local ant faunas, we present The Ants of Konza Prairie.
--The Antlab welcomes a new Ph. D. candidate, Natalie Clay, late of Colby College. Natalie will be joining the expedition to Peru in December.
--Jon gives a presentation at the Gordon Conference on Metabolic Ecology.
--Jon's paper on reproductive scaling comes out in Functional Ecology.
--Mike goes semainr' at Brown and the Cambridge Ent Society. Jon and David earn Adams summer scholarships.David heads to Ecuador; Jon to the Respirometer. Mike arrives at The Harvard Forest for a 6-month sabbatical. Re-discovers winter.
--Mike goes a seminarin', first to Entomology at UIllinois Champagne-Urbana (where the jammin' was excellent), then to Zoology at UFlorida (where the post talk reception was out of this world).
--Kaspari gets $47K from NSF to fund the third Gordon Conference on the Metabolic Basis of Ecology. Mike is co-chair with Bob Sterner.
--The press gets wind of Yanoviak, Kaspari, Dudley and Poinar's forthcoming paper in The American Naturalist on a nematode that turns Cephalotes atratus gasters bright red.

Timeless
--National Geographic awards the AntLab $21K to study the biogeography of salt"
--Mike and Jon, travel to BCI for 10 days with Debby Kaspari and Brad Stevenson to begin studies of microbial responses to the Gigante Fertilization Project.
--Alum Michael Weiser begins a postdoc with Robb Dunn and Nate Sanders at NC State to study global warming and ant communitis
--Alum Steve Yanoviak begins his professorship at UArkansas-Little Rock.
--Donoso and Shik earn Adam's scholarships
--Ysabel Milton's honor's thesis on micropatchiness in Brown Food Web's comes out in Oecologia.
--Kaspari lead's our second study of the Size Grain Hypothesis in this paper in Ecological Entomology.
--Kaspari receives a Bullard Fellow for Spring Sabbatical '08 at Harvard Forest
--Back from a trip up the Rio Napo, Peru, with Steve Yanoviak and Robert Dudley (thats me on the canopy walkway). Check out the virtual refrigerator door or this panorama to get a hint. We should be updating this soon with photos from Field Season 2006
--Steve Yanoviak leads this Nature paper on the wonderful story of the gliding ant, Cephalotes atratus.-- Kaspari explores the consequences of size gradients in ant communities in PNAS.

Writing:
Scaling biodiversity: how bacteria, fungi, and ant communities respond to the same tropical landscape
Teaching:
Advanced EEB and Ecomunch
Best time for a meeting:
T, W, Th afternoon
Traveling:
Not as such
Reading:
Rabbit Redux, John Updike
Dubliners, James Joyce
Watching:
Mad Men
Listening:
Yimme Yames Tribute to
Beatles Whole frickin remastered catalogue babee

In honor of the 50th anniversary of Robert MacArthur's "warbler paper", download an original, high-resolution artwork, by Deborah Kaspari.

We focus on the behavior, function, and biogeography of soil arthropods. Toward that end we use gradients of temperature, NPP, and biogeochemistry to predict the abundance and function of brown (or detrital) food webs. Consider that most of a tropical forest’s leaves feed the microbes of the brown food web. The BFW is home to about 60% of tropical biodiversity and regulates nutrient recycling and carbon storage. Every part and process of the BFW—decomposition rates, nutrient concentration, biomass and abundance--varies 10 to 100-fold at grains of 1 square meter, so there is a lot to explain. We use a variety of theory--metabolic, trophic, stoichiometric, and aggregative--to search for general mechanisms underlying global ecological patterns.

Photo by Christien Ziegler