Ant Diversity in Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Ant Diversity in Great Smoky Mountains National Park
We know too little about the diversity of organisms, even about important groups such as the ants. Ants are nearly ubiquitous in terrestrial communities, where they can constitute a large portion of the animal biomass and play numerous roles in communities and ecosystems, serving as scavengers, predators, mutualists, and herbivores. Their nesting habits can alter the soil nutrient concentrations and biogeochemical cycles. Furthermore, ants are a useful indicator taxon of environmental stress and a diversity of other species. The work proposed here aims to document ant diversity in Great Smoky Mountains National Park . The end products of this work will be (i) an updated species list, (ii) a web page with natural history information, and (iii) a geo-referenced database with species ID and location.
We spent the summer of 2004 collecting ants that are found generally just in the leaf litter. This under-studied and under-sampled group of organisms likely play key roles in ecosystem function and affect the diversity of countless other organisms, yet little is known about their distribution or abundance. Along with a team of undergraduates (~5) and graduate students (2), we collected data from 16-m2 plots at 13 forested sites. To date, we have identified 23 ant species. Several important results have emerged from these data. The most important result is that our sampling techniques collect an almost entirely different set of species than the techniques used so far (e.g., pitfall traps). However, richness of leaflitter ants and ground foraging ants track one another in both space and time. We also devoted some time to processing samples from Chuck Parker’s “how to conduct ant ATBI” project. Together, these activities have provided a wealth of information on ant diversity in the Great Smokies.
