“…Ants represent a significant portion of total animal biomass and insect abundance in forest canopies (Blüthgen & Stork, 2007;Davidson, Cook, Snelling, & Chua, 2003;Floren, Wetzel, & Staab, 2014), and are a good model taxon for studying arboreal communities across forest successional stages (Floren, Freking, Biehl, & Linsenmair, 2001;Klimes et al, 2012;Silva, Feitosa, & Eberhardt, 2007). Arboreal ant species richness and functional diversity typically increase during forest succession (Bihn et al, 2008;Dunn, 2004;Marques, Espírito-Santo, Neves, & Schoereder, 2017;Silva et al, 2007), in part due to overall increases in tree size and diversity, and nest site availability (Campos et al, 2006;Klimes et al, 2012;Ribas et al, 2003). As individual trees age and grow taller, the resident ant community also changes to include fewer groundnesting species (Dejean, Djiéto-Lordon, Céréghino, & Leponce, 2008;Tschinkel & Hess, 1999).…”