By Aaron M. Ellison, Nicholas J. Gotelli, Elizabeth J. Farnsworth, and Gary D. Alpert. New Haven (Connecticut): Yale University Press. $29.95 (flexibound). xvii 398 p.; ill.; index. ISBN: 978-0300-16930-0. 2012. In 1977, I enrolled in an ant taxonomy course with one of this book’s coauthors (Alpert). E. O. Wilson, our sponsor and mentor, began by introducing us to the apostles of myrmecology, each immortalized in framed photographs proudly displayed on the walls of the “Ant Room” in Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. After an inspirational and sometimes sentimental discourse, we were left in the company of roughly a million specimens, our own collections of pinned and pickled ants in need of names, and the challenges of decoding Creighton’s Ants of North America (1950. Cambridge (MA): Museum of Comparative Zoology). We slogged through keys, the going often tough. Today, A Field Guide to the Ants of New England fortunately offers user-friendly instruction to provide an introduction to the classification and biology of the 130-plus species in southern Canada, eastern New York, and the New England states. Unlike most books of the genre, this volume has multiple authors, who have combined their diverse experience to produce a concise and effective guide. The two lead authors, Ellison and Gotelli, are renowned community, ecosystem, and climate change ecologists, and statistical modelers whose work has featured ants. Farnsworth is a plant physiological ecologist, conservation biologist, and an author of guidebooks. Alpert’s research on global ant diversity emphasizes the faunas of the southwest U.S., Madagascar, and the Philippines; he has been a frequent instructor in the Ant Course sponsored by the California Academy of Sciences and Museum of Comparative Zoology. The authors merge their abilities as evolutionary, ecological, and behavioral biologists with their own taxonomic training and encounters with ants to instruct readers how to find what they are looking for and identify what they have found, aided by extensive line drawings, distribution maps, high-resolution digital images, and quality color photographs from their own portfolios. Couplets on the inside of the cover and first and last pages, printed on heavy-duty paper for durable field use, enable quick sorting of ants, first by worker body size, to identify genera, which are separated by color-coded tabs. The authors provide common names for each species, brief descriptions of habitat and natural history, and how to distinguish “look-alike” species with character illustrations. A well-researched chapter on biogeography and resource references closes the book. All well and good, but do the keys work? The outlook is promising: the authors acknowledge training by Stefan Cover and André Francoeur, as well as input from preeminent ant taxonomist James Trager, among other knowledgeable contributors, and ensure the keys have been professionally testdriven and serviced before publication. This book will undoubtedly benefit naturalists and researchers in need of an introduction to the ant fauna of the northeast. The increasing use of ants to monitor climate change and ecosystem health as well as the general use of ants as models is creating demands for ant identification by researchers, paraprofessionals, and citizen scientists, and this helpful volume will serve these needs. A Field Guide to the Ants of New England appears to be destined to be known, at least in myrmecological circles, as the “New England Bible.” James F. A. Traniello, Biology, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts

A Field Guide to the Ants of New England. By Aaron M. Ellison, Nicholas J. Gotelli, Elizabeth J. Farnsworth, and Gary D. Alpert. New Haven (Connecticut): Yale University Press. $29.95 (flexibound). xvii + 398 p.; ill.; index. ISBN: 978-0-300-16930-0. 2012.

Soil organisms drive major ecosystem functions by mineralising carbon and releasing nutrients during decomposition processes, which supports plant growth, aboveground biodiversity and, ultimately, human nutrition. Soil ecologists often operate with functional groups to infer the effects of individual taxa on ecosystem functions and services. Simultaneous assessment of the functional roles of multiple taxa is possible using food‐web reconstructions, but our knowledge of the feeding habits of many taxa is insufficient and often based on limited evidence. Over the last two decades, molecular, biochemical and isotopic tools have improved our understanding of the feeding habits of various soil organisms, yet this knowledge is still to be synthesised into a common functional framework. Here, we provide a comprehensive review of the feeding habits of consumers in soil, including protists, micro‐, meso‐ and macrofauna (invertebrates), and soil‐associated vertebrates. We have integrated existing functional group classifications with findings gained with novel methods and compiled an overarching classification across taxa focusing on key universal traits such as food resource preferences, body masses, microhabitat specialisation, protection and hunting mechanisms. Our summary highlights various strands of evidence that many functional groups commonly used in soil ecology and food‐web models are feeding on multiple types of food resources. In many cases, omnivory is observed down to the species level of taxonomic resolution, challenging realism of traditional soil food‐web models based on distinct resource‐based energy channels. Novel methods, such as stable isotope, fatty acid and DNA gut content analyses, have revealed previously hidden facets of trophic relationships of soil consumers, such as food assimilation, multichannel feeding across trophic levels, hidden trophic niche differentiation and the importance of alternative food/prey, as well as energy transfers across ecosystem compartments. Wider adoption of such tools and the development of open interoperable platforms that assemble morphological, ecological and trophic data as traits of soil taxa will enable the refinement and expansion of the multifunctional classification of consumers in soil. The compiled multifunctional classification of soil‐associated consumers will serve as a reference for ecologists working with biodiversity changes and biodiversity–ecosystem functioning relationships, making soil food‐web research more accessible and reproducible.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/brv.12832

Feeding habits and multifunctional classification of soil‐associated consumers from protists to vertebrates

Multiple pathways exist for species to respond to changing climates. However, responses of dispersal-limited species will be more strongly tied to ability to adapt within existing populations as rates of environmental change will likely exceed movement rates. Here, we assess adaptive capacity in Plethodon cinereus, a dispersal-limited woodland salamander. We quantify plasticity in behavior and variation in demography to observed variation in environmental variables over a 5-year period. We found strong evidence that temperature and rainfall influence P. cinereus surface presence, indicating changes in climate are likely to affect seasonal activity patterns. We also found that warmer summer temperatures reduced individual growth rates into the autumn, which is likely to have negative demographic consequences. Reduced growth rates may delay reproductive maturity and lead to reductions in size-specific fecundity, potentially reducing population-level persistence. To better understand within-population variability in responses, we examined differences between two common color morphs. Previous evidence suggests that the color polymorphism may be linked to physiological differences in heat and moisture tolerance. We found only moderate support for morph-specific differences for the relationship between individual growth and temperature. Measuring environmental sensitivity to climatic variability is the first step in predicting species' responses to climate change. Our results suggest phenological shifts and changes in growth rates are likely responses under scenarios where further warming occurs, and we discuss possible adaptive strategies for resulting selective pressures.

Evaluating within-population variability in behavior and demography for the adaptive potential of a dispersal-limited species to climate change.

Eastern Red-backed Salamanders are colour polymorphic and have become a model system for examining ecological separation and the mechanisms for potential divergence in sympatry. Morphs of this species are differentiated along several niche axes including temperature optima, territorial behaviour, and response to predators. We were interested in whether temporal variation in ecological conditions would affect foraging behavior and ultimately diet. The goal of our study was to compare the diets of striped and unstriped P. cinereus over a range of seasonal conditions to better understand if the reported differences observed in the fall season at our field site remain consistent through the active season of this species. Diet differences between the two morphs were greatest during spring and fall when salamanders are most abundant at the surface. These diet differences were driven largely by two prey categories. In the spring, striped salamanders ate more oribatid mites and in the fall they consumed more entomobryomorph Collembola. Trade-offs associated with territory acquisition coupled with physiological and morphological differences may explain the observed seasonal niche partitioning related to the diet in this population.

Niche partitioning along the diet axis in a colour polymorphic population of Eastern Red-backed Salamanders, Plethodon cinereus

Predator perception across space and time: relative camouflage in a colour polymorphic salamander

Numerous authors have studied the diet of the Eastern Red-backed Salamander (Plethodon cinereus) and have described this species as a generalist predator of invertebrates. In most studies, prey taxa are identified to the family or order level. Additionally, few studies have directly assessed dietary preference by comparing diet to available prey. We chose an important component of the diet of red-backed salamanders (ants) to test whether salamanders altered their diets temporally and to determine if salamanders preyed on a subset of available ant prey. We identified ant species in salamander diets over a 13 mo period. In the fall season we also compared ants in stomach contents to those available in the surrounding leaf litter to determine if territorial residents of P. cinereus selectively forage on different ant species. We found significant temporal differences in ant species incorporated in the diet of P. cinereus that were consistent with our detailed examination of salamander ant preference...

https://bioone.org/journals/the-american-midland-naturalist/volume-174/issue-2/0003-0031-174.2.265/Selective-Foraging-on-Ants-by-a-Terrestrial-Polymorphic-Salamander/10.1674/0003-0031-174.2.265.pdf

Cameron Eddy

Papers

Selective Foraging on Ants by a Terrestrial Polymorphic Salamander