2012
-- Robert Dudley is the lead author on an Insights essay in Biotropica entitled "Lust for salt in the western Amazon. Not for the faint of heart.
2011
-- Adam Kay(with Jon and Mike) is lead author on Diet composition does not affect ant colony tempo, which was a featured article in Functional Ecology
--Melanie Moses from U New Mexico visits the AntLab and talks ant colony organization.
-- Dr. Jon Shik (AntLab Ph. D.) is now a post doc at North Carolina State
-- Dr. Mary Johnston (Antlab M.S.) has joined the faculty of Concordia University, Austin Texas
-- We welcome Jelena Bujan and Jackson Helms as new Ph. D. candidates.
--Mike, along with colleagues Joe Zhou at OU, Brian Enquist at U of Arizona, and Jim Brown and Bob Waide at U New Mexico, was awarded a $4.8 million grant from NSF MacroSystems: "Experimental MacroEcology: the kinetics of biodiversity.
--In August, David Donoso and Natalie Clay presented parts of their thesis work at the ESA meetings in Austin. Mike got a poster in the far corner of the hall, but was happy with that.
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AntLab Archives
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Writing:
Two worlds 30 m apart: thermal ranges of tropical canopy and litter ants
Teaching:
Intro Zoo (400 students) spring semester
Best time for a meeting:
T/Th afternoons
Traveling:
Nothing through February
Reading:
Swamplandia, Karen Russell
Teach like a champion Doug Lemov
Watching:
Justified.
Listening:
Lotsa Mozart piano concertos
Boot Liquor Radio
In honor of the 50th anniversary of Robert MacArthur's "warbler paper", download an original, high-resolution artwork, by Deborah Kaspari.
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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
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