Ecologists study the factors that regulate the abundance and diversity of organisms. We explore how ants and other soil invertebrates vary in abundance and diversity as we move from place to place across the planet. Sometimes that means comparing the makeup of the arthropod community a few meters away, other times it requires us to catch a flight to Panama, Oregon, or Massachusetts. Here are links to our two latest two proejcts. To get a more complete picture of our work, scan (or even read!) our pdf reprints.

Forty meters below the lush green of tropical canopy is the brown world where bacteria and fungi rot the dead. In doing so these microbes feed a diversity of organisms and recycle the forest's nutrients. The brown world is intriguingly patchy--the abundance of BFW critters in adjacent bits of litter can vary 100-fold, some litter patches buzzing with life while others are strangely sterile. We propose that this patchiness arises from the interaction of predators, defenses, and the chemistry with which they build new hyphae, exoskeletons, and toxins. MORE

The ants are common and dominant parts of most terrestrial ecosystems. We travelled across the New World, from tundra to tropical rainforest, sampling soil ant communities along the way to answer the question, how and why do these communities vary in size, abundance, and diversity? We found that two key ecosystem variables, temperature and productivity repeatedly helped us understand why some habitats had a 100 times more ants, more species, as well as some suprising variability in the average size of an ant colony as you move from place to place across the planet. MORE

"I predict there will be erected a two- or three-way classification of organisms and their geometrical and temporal environments, this classification consuming most of the creative energy of ecologists. The future principles of the ecology of coexistence will then be of the form “for organisms of type A, in environments of structure B, such and such relationships will hold”. 
Robert MacArthur 1972