“…Experiments have already been successfully conducted by adding ant colonies into the ecosystem (Fowler, 1993) or translocating colonies of single species using semi-artificial nests (Peng, Nielsen, Offenberg & Birkmose, 2013;Riginos et al, 2015). At the level of whole ant communities, artificial bamboo nests have been used successfully for experimentally testing the effect of nest additions to the ecosystem (Davidson et al, 2006;Philpott & Foster, 2005), entrance-nest sizes (Arruda et al, 2016;Fagundes, Terra, Ribeiro & Majer, 2010;Jimenez-Soto & Philpott, 2015;Powell, 2009), vegetation connectance (Powell et al, 2011), and competitive interactions (Mathis, Philpott & Ramirez, 2016). The method is popular due to low cost, ease of manipulation of nests, and the ability to standardize in terms of bamboo species and cavity size.…”