Sean Menke
Lake Forest College, IL·Ecology & Evolution
Sometimes a single food source suddenly becomes hugely abundant, and animals that normally eat other things switch to feast on it. These food pulses can set off chain reactions through a food web.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
- Topics
periodical cicadas
Magicicada
ants
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2028
What they work on
- Test whether ants opportunistically shift their foraging to periodical cicadas during the spring emergence and the later summer hatch, using direct observations, nutrient baiting and pitfall trapping.
- Measure whether cicada-driven foraging shifts change the seed dispersal, scavenging and aphid protection that ants provide, using ant exclusion experiments in forest plots.
- Use stable isotope analysis to test whether ants that start at different trophic positions converge on a common diet in cicada emergence years compared with non-emergence years.
- Examine how cicada pulses change the strength of competition among ant species and their mutualisms, through comparisons within and between years.
More about the research
Every 13 or 17 years, billions of periodical cicadas emerge at once in the eastern U.S. Their emergence is one of the largest insect food pulses on Earth. This collaborative project asks how cicada pulses affect ants, which are among the most abundant animals on the planet. It also asks whether ants keep doing their usual ecological jobs when they switch diets.
Why it matters
Ants disperse seeds, scavenge, and tend insects in ways that matter for forestry and agriculture. Learning how a sudden food surplus changes these services could help predict how forest ecosystems respond to disruptions. It also adds data to the very limited body of work on how food pulses affect land invertebrates.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
John Lill
George Washington University, DC·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether ants opportunistically switch their foraging to periodical cicadas during the spring emergence and the summer hatch, using direct foraging observations, nutrient baiting and pitfall trapping in eastern U.S. forests.
Seth Newsome
University of New Mexico, NM·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether gut microbes in wild banner-tailed kangaroo rats make essential amino acids and short-chain fatty acids that hosts absorb, using compound-specific isotope tracing and metatranscriptomics.
Pete Guiden
Hamilton College, NY·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether overabundant white-tailed deer indirectly simplify rodent communities, narrow rodent diets and raise Lyme disease prevalence in northeastern US forests, using deer exclosure fences and unfenced controls.
The school
Lake Forest College: 2 labs on PI Pages.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.