The Kaspari Lab
Category: fieldwork
Potassium as a game-changer in prairie food webs
This study suggests why the K and Na in urine may reveal a plant’s hidden super-power in its battle against herbivores.
Read MoreAs ecosystems heat and green, ant abundance and diversity increases; but too much heat and these communities lose colonies and species.
One paradox in the recent flurry of papers reporting insect declines is that insects—ectotherms that rely on external sources of heat—are often predicted to benefit as their environment warms. In an open access paper accepted as a Report in the…
Read MoreToward a MacroEcology of Some of the Little Things that Run the World
Working to develop tech to ID and quantify inverts from NEON’s trap arrays
Read MoreHerbivores like a little salt with their protein
When offered grassland plots fertilized with Nitrogen+Phosphorus, Sodium, or both, above and belowground invertebrates respond to salt differently.
Read MoreThe tropics is just a big plate of scrambled eggs
Debby Kaspari is a featured artist at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson’s annual “Birds in Art” competition. Here is a brief video that captures the glories of painting birds in tropical forests.
Read MoreSuccumbing to the lure of the model organism: studying the imported red fire ant
Guest Post by Karl Roeder Ants. The adorable arthropods that have captured my imagination for years have finally become the focus of my Ph.D. research. They are abundant, diverse, and ecologically important with a variety of castes that contain a…
Read MoreExploring the role antibiotic compounds play in shaping tropical leaf litter invertebrate & microbial communities
Post by Jane Lucas This summer (2015) I am working on furthering my exploration of the role antibiotic chemicals play in the structuring of leaf litter invertebrate and microbial communities. This work was inspired by a classic Janzen paper entitled…
Read MoreCanopy and understory microclimates – how are the ants handling them?
The author, Jelena Bujan, in the canopy of Pseudobombax septenatum, a deciduous tree with smooth green bark. Jelena is completing her third field season on Barro Colorado Island, in Panama. In tropical forests, is frequently assumed that canopies are “deserts”…
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The Kaspari Lab 