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The efficacy of two collecting techniques, litter sifting and pitfall traps, for sampling leaf litter ants in tropical forests was compared. Litter sifting consistently sampled more ant genera, species, and individual workers than did pitfall traps. Litter sifting samples contained a greater proportion of smaller species and specialist species than did pitfall traps. Habitat variation between sites appeared to have little effect on the inherent differences in sampling efficacy and biases between the two methods.
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David M. Olson (1991) studied this question.
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