John Lill
George Washington University, DC·Ecology & Evolution
Sometimes an animal population suddenly explodes and floods an ecosystem with food. These 'resource pulses' can set off chain reactions through food webs, as consumers abandon their usual diets to feast on the new supply.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
- Topics
periodical cicadas
Magicicada
ants
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2028
What they work on
- 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.
- Determine whether cicada-driven foraging shifts reduce ant-provided services, such as seed dispersal, scavenging and protection of aphids, using ant exclusion experiments in emergence and non-emergence years.
- Use stable isotope analysis, a chemical tracer of diet, to test whether ant species that normally occupy different food-chain positions converge on a common diet during cicada emergence years.
- Examine how cicada pulses change competition between ant species and their mutualistic (mutually beneficial) partnerships, comparing results within and between years.
More about the research
In the eastern United States, billions of periodical cicadas emerge together every 13 or 17 years. This creates one of nature's largest insect food pulses. The project asks how this pulse changes the behavior of ants, among the most abundant animals on Earth. It also asks whether the shift ripples out to the services ants normally provide to forests.
Why it matters
Ants disperse seeds, scavenge dead animals and protect aphids, and these services matter for forestry and agriculture. Knowing how a sudden flood of cicada prey disrupts these services could help predict how forest ecosystems respond to resource pulses and other changes. The work also adds to the small body of research 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
Sean Menke
Lake Forest College, IL·Ecology & Evolution
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.
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
George Washington University: 13 labs on PI Pages, $382M a year on research, 225 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.