Michael D. Weiser

TL;DR: This is the first study demonstrating that the diversity of different microbial groups has significantly lower rates of turnover across temperature gradients than other major taxa, which has important implications for assessing the effects of human-caused changes in climate, land use and other factors.

TL;DR: It is shown that non-curve-fitting predictions readily derived from neutral theory are easily falsifiable and there is a current overwhelming weight of evidence against neutral theory.

TL;DR: It is suggested that ants make a transition from living in an interstitial environment when small to a planar environment when large, a habit continued by most terrestrial mammals.

TL;DR: Examining the latitudinal pattern of species richness across 1003 local ant assemblages finds latitudinal asymmetry, with southern hemisphere sites being more diverse than northern hemisphere sites, and the most parsimonious explanation is that greater climate change since the Eocene in the northern than in the southern hemisphere has led to more extinctions in the north with consequent effects on local ant species richness.

TL;DR: The results show that the overall distribution of function does increase towards the equator, but the functional diversity within regional-scale tropical assemblages is higher than that expected given their species richness.