NEW PAPER OUT! A checklist of South Dakota bumble bees (Hymenoptera, Apidae)

1st pub for 2023 just came out in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research! This was a lovely collaboration between SDSU entomologists (Abigail Martens and Paul Johnson) and our bee group at USDA-ARS NCARL (Eric Beckendorf, Louis Hesler, Jesse Daniels, and myself). We compiled specimen and literature records for bumble bees collected over the past 130Continue reading “NEW PAPER OUT! A checklist of South Dakota bumble bees (Hymenoptera, Apidae)”

NEW PAPER OUT! Woody perennial polycultures increase ant diversity and ant-mediated ecosystem services compared to conventional corn-soybean rotations

3rd pub for 2022 just came out in Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Environment! This work is the first paper from my postdoc at UIUC with Dr. Alex Harmon-Threatt. We measured ants and how much insect prey ants were consuming in woody perennial polycultures and corn-soybean rotations monthly for an entire year! Our abstract sums up our resultsContinue reading “NEW PAPER OUT! Woody perennial polycultures increase ant diversity and ant-mediated ecosystem services compared to conventional corn-soybean rotations”

NEW PAPER OUT! Testing the role of body size and litter depth on invertebrate diversity across six forests in North America

Probably the last pub for 2021 or our first for 2022. This paper in Ecology is technically my last “official” dissertation chapter and it feels fantastic to get it out. To provide some background, I started working on this project in the summer of 2014 and spent almost a year measuring >40000 mites, springtails, andContinue reading “NEW PAPER OUT! Testing the role of body size and litter depth on invertebrate diversity across six forests in North America”

NEW PAPER OUT! Thermal traits predict the winners and losers under climate change: an example from North American ant communities

Our next pub for 2021 was just published in Ecosphere. This paper marks one of many papers from our group from our resampling events across the United States that took place in 2017 and 2018. In collaboration with Jelena Bujan, Kirsten de Beurs, Michael Weiser, and Michael Kaspari, we asked which ant genera are increasingContinue reading “NEW PAPER OUT! Thermal traits predict the winners and losers under climate change: an example from North American ant communities”

NEW PAPER OUT! Testing effects of invasive fire ants and disturbance on ant communities of the longleaf pine ecosystem

1st pub for 2021 was just published in Ecological Entomology. This manuscript was a few years in the making as Julian Resasco and I originally talked about this back in ~2018. After a few job changes and moves, I am happy to say we finally finished it up! Broadly, we were interested in how disturbance andContinue reading “NEW PAPER OUT! Testing effects of invasive fire ants and disturbance on ant communities of the longleaf pine ecosystem”

NEW PAPER OUT! Thermal diversity of North American ant communities: Cold tolerance but not heat tolerance tracks ecosystem temperature

Our second NEON ants and 5th pub for 2020 was just published in Global Ecology and Biogeography. Led by Jelena Bujan, this is our first paper linking physiological traits like critical thermal max and min (CTmax and CTmin ) to different environmental abiotic conditions at a large geographical scale. A summary from Jelena in GEB… “InContinue reading “NEW PAPER OUT! Thermal diversity of North American ant communities: Cold tolerance but not heat tolerance tracks ecosystem temperature”

NEW PAPER OUT! Seasonal plasticity of thermal tolerance in ants

Great to see another publication out from one of my favorite places to do field work, the University of Oklahoma Biological Station. This is the 4th pub for 2020, which is shaping up to be quite the productive year! Recently published in Ecology, Jelena and I were interested in seeing if thermal tolerance, an importantContinue reading “NEW PAPER OUT! Seasonal plasticity of thermal tolerance in ants”

NEW PAPER OUT! Invasive Saltcedar and Drought Impact Ant Communities and Isopods in South-Central Nebraska

It has been a busy March as our third paper of 2020 was recently published in Environmental Entomology! This was a fun collaboration with Wyatt Hoback at Oklahoma State University, who I first met while working on our Ants of Oklahoma project. We decided to tackle a data set that had been collected almost 15Continue reading “NEW PAPER OUT! Invasive Saltcedar and Drought Impact Ant Communities and Isopods in South-Central Nebraska”

NEW PAPER OUT! Nutrient dilution and climate cycles underlie declines in a dominant insect herbivore

Second paper of 2020 is out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS for short)! Ellen Welti sums up the work nicely here… “Parsing variation in long-term patterns underlying insect abundances and assigning mechanisms are critical in light of recent reports of dramatic insect declines. Grasshopper abundancesContinue reading “NEW PAPER OUT! Nutrient dilution and climate cycles underlie declines in a dominant insect herbivore”

NEW PAPER OUT! The economics of optimal foraging by the red imported fire ant

First paper of 2020 is out in Environmental Entomology! Here we look at how the red imported fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, regulates its foraging behavior. This was an interesting project that we first piloted back in 2015 and built on all the way through the summer of 2018. We were interested in testing ideas fromContinue reading “NEW PAPER OUT! The economics of optimal foraging by the red imported fire ant”