We have a new paper on Old World Pheidole out in Journal of Biogeography. It includes a bunch of fun stuff including phylogenies, network analysis, and taxon cycles.
Category: Publications
New Island Biogeography Paper
New paper in Global Ecology & Biogeography with Kostas Triantis, Robert Ricklefs, and François Guilhaumon finds a surprising invariance in the slopes of species-area relationships across disparate taxa on oceanic archipelagoes. We developed a novel method to infer whether colonization, extinction, or speciation are likely responsible for the scaling patterns.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/geb.12301/abstract
Two new papers on tropical Chinese ant biodiversity
Cong has two new papers out so far this year! The first paper describes a new species, Aenictus yangi in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research. The other paper, in Zookeys, reports new records of ant species encountered in Yunnan, China. Both papers are coming from the field expedition to the Xingshuabanna area that Cong, Benoit Guenard, and Benjamin Blanchard made recently. They found 25 species previously unrecorded in Yunnan in addition to many new species (including, of course, Bannapone). Nice work, Cong!
New Pheidole paper published
Very happy to report the new paper on Pheidole from the lab, in collaboration with Lacey Knowles’ lab at U. Mich. We update the global phylogeny to around 300 species, and find some interesting relationships between the phylogenetic and macroecological structure of the genus. Also check out the story on the OIST website. This one has been a long time coming and a lot of work. Look for more work and bigger trees on Pheidole coming soon. 
Bannapone!
Benoit, Cong, and Benjamin made a great discovery on their trip to China, the first workers of one of the rarest ant genera in the world, Bannapone! The genus had previously only been known from a queen collected about 15 years ago. Our paper describes the worker of a different species of the genus.
See the paper here: http://biotaxa.org/Zootaxa/article/view/zootaxa.3734.3.6
and news article here: