State of the ant: how broad is our recent knowledge of Neotropical ant behavior?

ABSTRACT: Over the years, most scholarly published papers have studied vertebrates, despite invertebrates' higher species diversity and number of individuals. This has led to an inaccurate representation of global biodiversity patterns in scientific publications. Furthermore, the bias for studying vertebrates is also evident when comparing studies conducted in the tropics vs. temperate zones. We investigated whether similar taxonomic and geographical biases are maintained in recent years when studying the behavior of Neotropical ants. We searched for papers published between 2015 and 2022 with the words "ant" OR "ants" OR formicidae; tropic* OR neotropic* and behav* AND tropic* OR neotropic*. We found that recently published papers studying ants cover only ~10% of the Neotropical ant species, with a

SUBMITTER: Quesada-Hidalgo R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12459118 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature