one ant’s trash is another ant’s treasure: army ant middens provide resources for diverse ant assemblages

The army ant Eciton burchellii boasts more animal associates than any other animal species yet described, but the relationship between army ants and other ant species has only been studied in the context of predation. The waste deposits (middens) of army ant colonies are nitrogen-rich, a potentially high-value nutrient source for leaflitter arthropods. We explored this bottom-up role of army ant middens in the context of tropical ant communities. Our three main questions were 1) Which ant species forage on army-ants middens? 2) How does the bi-phasic life cycle of army ant colonies (affecting midden size, persistence, and abundance) affect which and how many ant species a midden boasts? 3) How do the ants that forage on army ant middens differ across elevations? Across 39 bivouacs we found 36 species of ants foraging on army ant middens. These included highly predatory ants, nitrogen-limited arboreal ants, and fungus-farming ants. Per-midden richness was significantly lower for the usua..., Three sites on the Pacific slope of the continental divide in Northern Costa Rica were surveyed for army ant midden attendance (Figure 2A): lowland tropical dry forest and tropical moist forest in Santa Rosa National Park (10º53’N, 85º46’W, 100-300 meters above sea level, henceforth “masl”), transitional premontane moist forest near Maritza Biological Station (10º58’N, 85º30’W, 400-650 masl), and premontane to lower montane wet forests in Monteverde (10º18’N, 84º49’W, 1100-1700 masl). At each site we used standard walking-encounter methods on small forest trails to locate army ant raids (Kumar & O'Donnell, 2009), following the direction of army-ant-carried food items back to the bivouac. We determined the phase of each bivouac based on the developmental stage of the developing synchronous brood within, with bivouacs housing larvae deemed nomadic and bivouacs housing pupae deemed statary. Once at the bivouac, middens were located by searching for a small column of worker ants (refuse..., Attached are .csv files containing raw and subsetted data used to make tables within the manuscript, as well as a list of deposited voucher specimens. Excel or any text editor can be used to open these files., # Data from: One ant’s trash is another ant’s treasure: Army ant middens provide resources for diverse ant assemblages

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.xpnvx0kj5](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.xpnvx0kj5)

These data include information on deposited voucher specimens as well as raw datasets analyzed within this article.

## Description of the data and file structure

The attached .csv files are as follows:

**Supplementary data 1 - Voucher specimen list**
This contains information on voucher specimens that were deposited to the Cornell University Insect Museum. The column \"CUIC_no\" indicates the unique identification number assigned by the Cornell University Insect Museum. The header \"ColDate\" indicates the collection date and \"ColTime\" is the collection time. Elevation is reported in units of meters above sea level.

**Supplementary data 2 - All observation records**
This contains information about species found per each observation. This dataset includes observations of bivouacs for whi...