The Kaspari Lab

Category: Uncategorized


As 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 More

Arts and Sciences

When students are asked to covey a principle of ecology in a work of art, remarkable things happen.

Read More

The Ten Principles of Ecology

I have been teaching a course called “Principles of Ecology” at OU since 1996. It was a traditional two one-hour lecture, one three-hour lab for most of those years. In 2013, I decided to flip the course, converting the lectures…

Read More

A slightly less paradoxical paradox

The Paradox of Enrichment is not the only outcome when you fertilize

Read More

One way to build a dietary generalist

Karl Roeder gives some background on the dietary diversity hidden in a population of red imported fire ants

Read More

What journal gets the first peek at your manuscript? Results from a year of ruminating.

The manuscript’s done. Now what?

Read More

Not all male ants are “sperm missiles”

When your mating system calls for patience, male ants will stick around for a while.

Read More

On the salutary effect of the Kudos Email

If you like someone’s work, don’t just cite them, write them!

Read More

On writing a strong NSF pre-proposal

Its been 4 years since NSF DEB began to require pre-proposals. What makes a strong one?

Read More

A manifesto for Biogeochemical Ecology

The theoretical and empirical challenges of Biogeochemical Ecology include: making biogeochemical maps scalable; translating elemental chemistry into ecological niches; building a science that predicts how the abiotic forms a template for the biotic.   Twenty-five chemical elements form the recipe for…

Read More