It is a first comprehensive study of ant communities in tropical trees considering specifically both foragers and nesters, and from the whole pieces of forest. It brings evidence that primary (old-growth) forest hosts more diverse and less invasive ant taxa than disturbed secondary forest.

Beyond these rather expected findings, we show that foragers itselves create greater part of those communities using a simple idea of subtracting nesters from foraging species diversity in a tree. These foraging communites are comprised not randomly but reflect foraging from nearby trees. This brings possibly quite very simply answer to an old question of tropical ecologists, why we observe so very few abundant but so many rare ant species in a sampled-tree.

Klimes P, Fibich P, Idigel C, Rimandai M (2015) Disentangling the Diversity of Arboreal Ant Communities in Tropical Forest Trees. PLoS ONE 10(2): e0117853. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0117853