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Test of random effect in lme4

Luciano La Sala wrote:
In general testing significance of components in a model *after* model
selection is dubious ...  I agree with most of what Zuur et al say, but
I am only comfortable with stepwise procedures as a relatively necessary
evil for eliminating non-significant interaction terms to simplify
interpretation of the remaining model.
Your main problem is that the log-likelihoods returned by lm and lmer
are **NOT COMPARABLE**.  Sooner or later there should probably be a
warning to that effect somewhere in the documentation ...

  You may be able to use the RLRsim package to solve your problem.
I would leave it in whether or not it is significant (and it's
probably not).  Note that as expected all the fixed effect parameters
are estimated identically under lmer and lm ... the reason to drop it
would be to have the convenience of not dealing with mixed effects at all.
Unlikely at best, unless your response variable has a very small
magnitude (e.g., you are comparing differences hummingbird weights
across different diet treatments, and measuring them in units of petagrams)