Mark Wong

Please share! 🙏
Recruiting a PhD student in Sydney in 2026 ✨🎓✨
Exciting fieldwork & experiments on ants in Australia 🐜
International and domestic applicants welcome 🌍
Details: markwongecology.com/join
#PhDPosition #GradSchool #Ecology #Zoology #Conservation #Biodiversity #Invasive #Entomology #Ant

Join — Sydney Functional Ecology

Excited to share a PhD opportunity in my upcoming lab at The University of Sydney!
Join an ARC-funded project on the ecology of ant invasions in 2026 🐜
🇦🇺 Live in Sydney, ant around Australia
🌍 Intl + Domestic applicants welcome
markwongecology.com/join
#PhD #Ecology #Biodiversity
Pls share, thx 🙏

When differences help – or hinder – coexistence: Functional insights from mangrove ants Mark K. L. Wong, Yuet Him Choi, François Brassard, Chi Man Leong, Toby P. N. Tsang, Owen T. Lewis, Benoit Guénard This is a plain language summary of a Functional Ecology research article which can…

📰Published📰 When differences help – or hinder – coexistence: Functional insights from mangrove ants🐜

buff.ly/3UpczpI

🧪🌍

Functional trait dissimilarity drives arboreal ant community assembly while competitive trait hierarchies shape colony performance in experimental mesocosms Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Do you like functional traits, competition, mesocosm experiments, ants and rigorous fieldwork in unusual tropical systems?

Then you might like this new paper - the last from my DPhil at Oxford- in Functional Ecology:

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Functional trait dissimilarity drives arboreal ant community assembly while competitive trait hierarchies shape colony performance in experimental mesocosms Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Do you like functional traits, competition, mesocosm experiments, ants and rigorous fieldwork in unusual tropical systems?

Then you might like this new paper - the last from my DPhil at Oxford- in Functional Ecology:

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New paper in #BiologicalConservation: Artificial light at night has surprisingly limited effects on ant communities in a field experiment💡🐜 Research by fantastic students I had the pleasure of supervising at UWA. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#ClimateChange can exacerbate ant invasion impacts by unleashing indoor populations into outdoor environments

doi.org/10.1111/ddi....

#invasivespecies #ants

Climate Change Can Exacerbate Ant Invasion Impacts by Unleashing Indoor Populations Into Outdoor Environments Aim Thousands of non-native species have established populations and spread in outdoor environments (i.e., Naturalised), yet some populations or species only occur indoors, potentially due to unsuit...

With global warming, non-native ants currently confined to indoor environments (e.g. buildings, greenhouses) may march outdoors, impacting nature and society. Our new study:
dx.doi.org/10.1111/ddi....

Latitude shapes diel patterns in insect biodiversity royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... | #BiologyLetters #Ecology #EnvironmentalScience

Latitude shapes diel patterns in insect biodiversity | Biology Letters The writings of naturalists from two centuries past are brimming with accounts of the stark differences in the kinds and numbers of organisms encountered during the day and night as well as between the tropical and temperate zones. However, only recently ...

New paper in #BiologyLetters: preliminary evidence for a less appreciated latitudinal biodiversity gradient – in how communities partition time⌛️🌞🌔

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

@royalsocietypublishing.org

New preprint:

Ant Diversity and Foraging Across the Diel Cycle is Unaltered by Experimental Exposure to Artificial Light at Night

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Lead author Auke-Florian Hiemstra holds the oldest known caddisfly casing containing microplastic, dating to 1971. Photo: Liselotte Rambonnet.

A caddisfly casing with pieces of blue microplastic, dating 1986. Photo: Auke-Florian Hiemstra

NEW PAPER, JUST OUT! 👀

Insects from the '70s and '80s were already collecting microplastic, decades before the term microplastic even existed. 🤯

A thread on the surprising history of this pollutant and the incredible insect larvae that helped us uncover it. 🐛

Let's dive in! 🧵👇 1/x

New preprint:

Functional traits drive the competitive assembly of mangrove ant communities and influence colony performance in competition mesocosms

ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

A fun study in a unique ecosystem that never made it to my DPhil thesis but is finally(!) written up

Misrepresentation of invasive species in the mass media with images of unrelated organisms Click on the article title to read more.

It happens frequently. conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

4/ 🧩 Fig. 1: Human Pressure > Climate & Geography
Our first key finding: Human pressure (as in human footprint) outweighs climate and geography, being responsible for 21.5% of species turnover and 20.6% of trait turnover.

Human activity reshapes biodiversity far beyond natural gradients. 🏙️🌾🌍

Check out our new preprint:

Human pressure homogenises #species and #traits globally

Congrats Sara!

The global spread and invasion capacities of alien ants Many alien species are neither cultivated nor traded but spread unintentionally, and their global movements, capacities to invade ecosystems, and susc…

Would love to be added, thank you! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Would love to be added, thanks Jane!

Trait‐based ecology of terrestrial arthropods In focusing on how organisms' generalizable functional properties (traits) interact mechanistically with environments across spatial scales and levels of biological organization, trait-based approach...

Would love to be added, thank you! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Hello friends old and new, I’m an #ecologist and #entomologist interested in #traits and #invasions and #community and #macroecology. I have an inordinate fondness for #ants, the movers and shakers of ecosystems. Looking forward to connecting! 🌤️