Entomologist. he/him. Ants, species interactions, conservation, metabarcoding; other exciting things! Currently working on army ant ecology in central Africa
Porto, Portugal
Joined October 2016
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How do non-native species fit into foodwebs? Our new paper in Ecology shows that native generalists (Scolopendra centipedes and Telfair's skinks) partition their diets with superabundant non-native ants, but also consume them!
📃 Available now 📃
🐜👀
esajournals.onlinelibrary.wi…
This is one of the coolest papers I've been involved with thus far! It's often tricky to tease apart results in field systems like this but the team (led by the supreme @JordanCuff) did a fab job with some sophisticated new tools and analyses. Great to be a part of! 🧵below 👇
📜🎉New paper in @Oikos_Journal🎉📜
Prey nutrient content is associated with the trophic interactions of spiders and their prey selection under field conditions
doi.org/10.1111/oik.10712
I'm super excited to see this out! Read about our exciting results in the thread below: 🧵👇
ALT Prey nutrient content is associated with the trophic interactions of spiders and their prey selection under field conditions
Double good news day: 2 more years of funding secured to research army ants 🐜 in Africa 🇬🇶, PLUS we completed a pilot Dorylus exclusion plot this week
Super excited… let’s see if it works🤞 🔍
More super cool scenes from Dorylus: vid 1 shows driver ants at their nest 10 mins before a raid and vid 2 was taken 2m ahead of the raid front later on
Many thanks Maf! I think we might have trouble trying to promote an “army ant friendly campus” in Equitorial Guinea, but I’m willing to try
🐜🐜 INCREDIBLY EXCITED 🐜🐜 to announce that I'm joining @CIBIO_InBIO as a postdoc researching Dorylus driver ant/siafu ecology in the rainforests of Central Africa! Dreamy! Exciting! ARMY ANTS!
Very grateful to have been a part of this super @DurrellWildlife expedition with amazing collaborators from @NHM_London earlier this year. A lot of cool findings still to come!
🦋 Over 500 species of insect found in Mauritius! 🪲
🪰 We carried out an insect “BioBlitz” to help us understand which invertebrate species live at our Mauritius field sites.
🐜 Some of the species could even be new to science!
👉 durrell.org/news/looking-out…
📷 @MaximumInsect
Outrageously good photoblog for myrmecophiles!
🆕#blogpost: Phil Hoenle @myrmecoPhil shares amazing pictures of "the astonishing #diversity of Papua New Guinea" 🐜 Check it out!
#insects #research
blog.myrmecologicalnews.org/…
Hi Kévin! The weight of each study (so the size of the points) is inversely proportional to its variance. In our study this is calculated from the sample size and standard deviation extracted from articles 😃⚖️
It's also a quantification of the scale of the problem potentially caused by non-native ant invasion (BIG!). Hopefully this is info stakeholders can use to justify improving prevention/control measures where needed. 6/6
resjournals.onlinelibrary.wi…
Whilst this study has its limitations (check out the paper and supplementary), it's a clear corroboration that non-native ants are drivers rather than passengers of dramatic native biodiversity declines in invaded areas. 5/6
This pattern held when we reanalysed the data after pooling all effect sizes extracted from a single article in a single "community level" effect size (to account for non-independence of taxa in a community). 4/6
...and extracted richness (53 effect sizes) and abundance (153 effect sizes) data of local animal communities in paired sites with and without non-native ants. We found invasion by non-native ants approximately halved the diversity of local communities. 3/6
We extracted data from 46 articles studying relatively undisturbed natural systems around the world to isolate the effects of ant invasion (i.e. not much human activity, few other non-native species etc)... 2/6
Chuffed this chapter from my PhD is finally online!! 🙌😃🐜
Our meta-analysis quantifies the effect of non-native ants on local animal community diversity in multiple locations globally. Spoiler alert: non-native ants are PRETTY BAD 🧵 1/6
resjournals.onlinelibrary.wi…
