Insect Ecology Group
Kalsum Mohd Yusah
PhD Student
km450@cam.ac.uk
(01223) 768919
Research interests
Ant Community Structure in the High Canopy of Lowland Dipterocarp Forest
I have a keen interest in living things and the diversity of life, particularly of those which are found high above the forest floor. Forest canopies everywhere in the world are famous for being the unknown frontier that contains lives that are still mysterious to scientists. My current interest is looking at how the ant communities in the high canopy are structured, focusing on whether or not ‘ant mosaics’ exist in the high canopy of the tropical rainforest.
There has been considerable recent debate about whether ant communities in the canopy of tropical rainforests are organized as “mosaics”: that is, as a patchwork of a small number of dominant and subdominant species structured by intense interspecific competition. Ant mosaics appear to be almost universal in tropical plantations and possibly also in secondary forests, but there is some evidence that they are not a major feature of primary (undisturbed) forest.
The fieldwork was carried out in the primary forest of Danum Valley, Sabah, Malaysia over a period of 14 months. The questions that I am trying to answer are: how are their niches distributed in space and time; are these communities structured by competition for limited resources, microclimatic fluctuations, or are they structured randomly by stochastic processes?
With help from volunteer climbers, I managed to develop novel techniques for sampling and studying this relatively inaccessible fauna. We have used double-rope climbing techniques to access the canopy, and have studied the ants by direct 24 hour in-situ observations. We have measured temperature and humidity in both the canopy and the ants themselves, and have sampled the species present by fogging and baiting.
The results so far showed that the canopy is being utilised by different species at different times of day, that different species have distinct temperature optima, and that indeed the dominant ants do tend to exclude each other and members of other species.
Publications
Yusah K.M., Fayle T.M., Harris G. & Foster W.A. (In press). Optimising diversity assessment protocols for high canopy ants in tropical rain forest. Biotropica.
Foster W.A., Snaddon J.L., Turner E.C., Fayle T.M., Cockerill T.D., Ellwood M.D.F., Broad G.R., Chung A.Y.C., Eggleton E., Chey V.K., Yusah K.M. (2011). Establishing the evidence base for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem function in the oil palm landscapes of South East Asia. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 366: 3277-3291.
Andersen S.B., Gerritsma S., Yusah K.M., Mayntz D., Hywel-Jones N., Billen J., Boomsma J. J., & Hughes D. P. (2009). The life of a dead ant - The expression of an adaptive extended phenotype. American Naturalist 174:424-433.
Fayle T.M., Ellwood M.D.F., Turner E.C., Snaddon J.L., Yusah K.M. & Foster W.A. (2008). Bird’s nest ferns: islands of biodiversity in the rainforest canopy. Antenna 32: 34-37.