Dirk Mezger

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at University of Bayreuth

Vulnerability to habitat fragmentation Habitat fragmentation caused by human activities has consequences for the distribution and movement of organisms. Betts et al. present a global analysis of how exposure to habitat fragmentation affects the composition of ecological communities (see the Perspective by Hargreaves). In a dataset consisting of 448...

The relationship between levels of dominance and species richness is highly contentious, especially in ant communities. The dominance‐impoverishment rule states that high levels of dominance only occur in species‐poor communities, but there appear to be many cases of high levels of dominance in highly diverse communities. The extent to which domina...

What forces structure ecological assemblages? A key limitation to general insights about assemblage structure is the availability of data that are collected at a small spatial grain (local assemblages) and a large spatial extent (global coverage). Here, we present published and unpublished data from 51,388 ant abundance and occurrence records of mo...

Spiny ants (Polyrhachis Smith) are a hyper-diverse genus of ants distributed throughout the Palaeotropics and the temperate zones of Australia. To investigate the evolution and biogeographic history of the group, we reconstructed their phylogeny and biogeography using molecular data from 209 taxa and seven genes. Our molecular data support the mono...

Many studies have focused on the impacts of climate change on biological assemblages, yet little is known about how climate interacts with other major anthropogenic influences on biodiversity, such as habitat disturbance. Using a unique global database of 1128 local ant assemblages, we examined whether climate mediates the effects of habitat distur...

Habitat fragmentation studies have produced complex results that are challenging to synthesize. Inconsistencies among studies may result from variation in the choice of landscape metrics and response variables, which is often compounded by a lack of key statistical or methodological information. Collating primary datasets on biodiversity responses...

We measured δ 15 N values and inferred the trophic positions of 151 ground ant species from four types of rain forests (alluvial, limestone, dipterocarp forest, and Kerangas) in Gunung Mulu National Park, in Sarawak, Malaysia. Four hypo-theses were tested: 1) Ground-foraging ants occur in all trophic levels; 2) ant subfamilies differ in their troph...

Biodiversity assessment of tropical taxa is hampered by their tremendous richness, which leads to large numbers of singletons and incomplete inventories in survey studies. Species estimators can be used for assessment of alpha diversity, but calculation of beta diversity is hampered by pseudo-turnover of species in undersampled plots. To assess the...

List of ant species and their numbers of occurrences in the four forest types. (XLSX)

Unbiased estimations of alpha, beta and gamma Shannon diversity index *H according to the partitioning procedure of Marcon et al. [19]. (PDF)

Contrasting theories have been proposed to explain the structure of ecological communities. Here, we studied the impact of environmental factors and spatial patterns on ground-foraging ant communities in four different forest types of Gunung Mulu National Park in Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia. Forest types differed in their environmental parameters and...

More than ninety years after Wheeler’s 1919 “Ants of Borneo,” we present a comprehensive list of the Bornean ant fauna, recorded in the states of Brunei, Sabah and Sarawak (Malaysia), and Kalimantan (Indonesia). Our critical review of ant literature resulted in a catalogue of 97 ant genera with 717 valid species and 52 additional subspecies of ants...

The yellow crazy ant Anoplolepis gracilipes is a common and important invasive ant species in all parts of tropical Asia, including Borneo. We studied the impact of this ant species on the chronological development of an ant community in an artificial clearing at the edge of the alluvial forest in the Gunung Mulu National Park in Sarawak, Malaysia,...

We tested the hypothesis that species of a diverse leaf-litter ant community are separated by the temperature preferences of their broods along a thermal gradient. Therefore, temperature preferences of brood-tending workers from 41 ant species co-occurring in four types (alluvial, limestone, kerangas and dipterocarp forest) of primary rain forest i...

Eurhopalothrix elke sp.n. of the E. platisquama group is described from Sarawak, Borneo. A revised key is presented for the workers of this species group, together with a new record for Eurhopalothrix dubia TAYLOR, 1990 and a distri-bution map. Introduction The myrmicine ant genus Eurhopalothrix BROWN & KEMPF, 1961 contains 37 species and is distri...

Eurhopalothrix elke sp.n. of the E. platisquama group is described from Sarawak, Borneo. A revised key is presented for the workers of this species group, together with a new record for Eurhopalothrix dubia TAYLOR, 1990 and a distribution map.

As a contribution to the knowledge of the natural history of Myrmicaria brunnea subcarinata (Smith, 1857), we studied the territory, circadian activity patterns, diet composition, trophobiotic interactions and fighting success of a colony of this species in an alluvial forest in Gunung Mulu National Park (Borneo, Malaysia). The territory size of th...

tropical rainforests. The Borneo Climbing Bamboo Dinochloa trichogona commonly occurs in the understorey of lowland forests on Borneo where it freXuently hosts trophobioses. TwentyReight species of ants attending ten species of hemipterans were found on these plants. Coreid bugs and delphacids contributed the majority of associations. On average, 2...

Trophobiotic interactions between ants, hemipterans and plants play an important role for all three partners. This study compared a broad spectrum of trophobiotic associations in a tropical rainforest in Sabah, Borneo. We studied partner specificity, ant recruitment, temporal continuity and monopolisation in 218 trophobioses, comprising 58 ant spec...

Species richness Up to now we have evaluated six plots of each forest type. By the Winkler method we found 75 species of ants altogether (40 species in alluvial forest, 51 in limestone forest). In limestone forest, more species per m² were found than in alluvial forest (Fig. 4). Only 16 species were found in both kinds of forests resulting in a low...