Ant communities of Florida's upland ecosystems: ecology and sampling

*[I used structured inventory to thoroughly sample ant communities in 5 upland ecosystems in north-central Florida using pitfall traps, litter extraction, baits, and hand collecting. I evaluated the efficiency of these methods for sampling ant species richness and relative abundance. I also evaluated the performance of 4 species richness estimators. A total of 37,961 ants of 94 species were captured, identified, and weighed to determine biomass. Results showed that Florida's ground-dwelling ant communities: (1) are numerically dominated by a few, common, generalist southeastern and eastern species; (2) exhibit a unimodal relationship among species richness, number of species occurrences, and body mass of workers; (3) have the greatest proportion of biomass of foraging workers among a few species with the largest individual workers; (4) have random species co-occurrence patterns and non-random patterns of size variance across ecosystems; and (5) are apparently not strongly impacted by introduced species in relatively undisturbed native ecosystems. Sampling captured about 66% of the regional fauna and about 70 to 90% of species within the ecosystems studied. For sampling species richness, combinations of sampling methods were much more effective than individual methods. Nonparametric estimators performed better than log-normal fitting, or Michaelis-Menten curve extrapolation. However, none of the estimators were stable and their estimates should be viewed with trepidation. A general rule of resource division (e.g., overlapping niches), together with similar minimum populations sizes adequately determines the relationship between species richness and abundance. The way that the impact of introduced ant species is assessed is evaluated and alternative assessments are proposed. The Ants of the Leaf Litter (ALL) protocol is recommended for thoroughly sampling ant assemblages in temperate and subtropical ecosystems.]

new, July 07