Manifesto
Community ecology seeks to understand the factors that regulate the nature, structure, and diversity of local assemblages of organisms. As such, it borrows from physiology, behavior, geology, meteorology, and evolutionary biology. A community ecologist's knowledge, like the Platte River, is almost by necessity "a mile-wide and an inch-deep".
But one feature common to ecologists is an obsession with their study taxa. I study ants. Ants are dominant and conspicuous animals in the world's terrestrial ecosystems. Ants are herbivores, fungivores, detritivores and top predators. Exported away from their natural environs they become ravenous pests. Studied in the field or the lab, they are endlessly fascinating.
Students entering my lab will have access to materials for research and other folks passionate about ant ecology. We have over 100,000 specimens and close to 1000 species of ants from sites in North and Central America in our collection. We have studied ants from Mojave desert to Rocky Mountain tundra, from Sandhills prairie to Amazonian rainforest. Each study in the AntLab, in every locality, represents a devotion to fieldwork, observation, and experiment informed by theory and hypotheses.
As human populations continue to grow, ecologists of this generation will see the worst and be in the position to do the most. Ecologists, as Aldo Leopold pointed out, live in a world of wounds. As a consequence, there is no shortage of interesting, applied, projects to work on in ecology nowadays. And this work must continue.
In sum, our lab is guided by two principles:
Know your organism.
and
Always have a question.