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VOLUME 19 TEACHING ISSUES AND EXPERIMENTS IN ECOLOGY
PRACTICE

Community interactions of army ants

Bicolored Antbird (Photo by Matt Deres, CC BY 3.0

AUTHOR

Emily Rauschert

Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, OH 44115

e.rauschert@csuohio.edu

THE ISSUE

Species interactions can be positive, negative, and neutral, and it's not always obvious which of these are occurring, especially with smaller species like ants. How could this be tested experimentally, and what kind of data would need to be gathered? How do these interactions occur in undisturbed settings, and how might human activities influence the types of interactions?

FOUR DIMENSIONAL ECOLOGY EDUCATION (4DEE) FRAMEWORK

  • Core Ecological Concepts:
    • Communities
      • Mutualisms
      • Exploitation
      • Competition
      • Predation
      • Stability
    • Biomes
      • Rainforests
  • Ecology Practices:
    • Quantitative skills
      • Data visualization
      • Data analysis and interpretation
    • Designing and critiquing investigations
  • Human-Environment Interactions:
    • Human-accelerated environmental change
      • there is no pristine ecosystem nor total equilibrium
      • Anthropogenic impacts
      • intentional and unintentional
  • Cross-cutting Themes:
    • Biogeography
      • alien/invasive species

STUDENT-ACTIVE APPROACHES

Think-pair share, small-group discussion, large-group discussion

STUDENT ASSESSMENTS

Formative: small group work and discussion. Summative: graph interpretation questions on assignments or exams, experimental design questions on exams

CLASS TIME

90 minutes, likely divided over two class periods

COURSE CONTEXT

This figure set is suitable for an introductory biology course, a nonmajors course, or a basic ecology course.

DOWNLOADS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is an adaptation of a figure set originally developed by Mark Kuhlmann in 2006 (Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology, Vol. 4: Issues Figure Set #1 [online]. https://tiee.esa.org/vol/v4/issues/figure_sets/army_ants/abstract.html), based on a research paper by Peter Wrege and colleagues "Antbirds Parasitize Foraging Army Ants." Ecology, 86(3), 2005, pp. 555-559. This Figure Set was developed as a part of the Teaching with Figures in Ecology Faculty Mentoring Network, which was supported by ESA's Transforming Ecology Education to 4D (TEE) Project with funding from the National Science Foundation (DBI-2120678).

CITATION

Emily Rauschert. October 2023. Community interactions of army ants. Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology, Vol. 19: Practice #7. https://tiee.esa.org/vol/v19/issues/figure_sets/rauschert/abstract.html

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