Now you see me, now you don't: verifying the absence of alien invasive yellow crazy ant in South Africa.

is an invasive species that is a major threat to native ecosystems worldwide. It has been listed as one of the top 100 worst invasive species in the world and is well known for its negative impact on native arthropods and some vertebrates. This study aimed to confirm the presence or absence of in some major South African harbours.

Dominance-diversity relationships in ant communities differ with invasion.

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 dominant species limit local richness through competitive exclusion remains unclear, but such exclusion appears more apparent for non-native rather than native dominant species.

Animal taxa contrast in their scale-dependent responses to land use change in rural Africa.

Human-dominated landscapes comprise the bulk of the world's terrestrial surface and Africa is predicted to experience the largest relative increase over the next century. A multi-scale approach is required to identify processes that maintain diversity in these landscapes. Here we identify scales at which animal diversity responds by partitioning regional diversity in a rural African agro-ecosystem between one temporal and four spatial scales.

A global database of ant species abundances.

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 Here, we present published and unpublished data from 51 ,388 ant abundance and occurrence records of more than 2,693 species and 7,953 morphospecies from local assemblages collected at 4,212 locations around the world. Ants were selected because they are diverse and abundant globally, comprise a large fraction of animal biomass in most terrestrial communities, and are key contributors to a range of ecosystem functions.

Temporal patterns of ant diversity across a mountain with climatically contrasting aspects in the tropics of Africa.

Factors that drive species richness over space and time are still poorly understood and are often context specific. Identifying these drivers for ant diversity has become particularly relevant within the context of contemporary global change events. We report on a long-term bi-annual (wet and dry seasons), standardized sampling of epigeal ants over a five year period on the mesic and arid aspects of an inselberg (Soutpansberg Mountain Range) in the tropics of Africa.