Integrative characterization of genetic and phenotypic differentiation in an ant species complex with strong hierarchical population structure and low dispersal abilities

Abstract

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

A putatively new ant species from the Cataglyphis cursor group displays low levels of polyandry with standard sexual reproduction

“…The Castrillo haplotypes differed by a single mutation, whereas the haplotype found in Salobralejo differed by 23 mutations compared to Castrillo's haplotypes (p distance = 0.041). The very low level of diversity observed within each locality is similar to previous findings in C. cursor and C. piliscapa (Clémencet et al 2005;Eyer et al 2022). This low diversity prevents us from testing for a pattern of isolation by distance.…”

“…1), were genetically isolated from the other populations of the two most closely related species C. piliscapa and C. cursor for both mtDNA and microsatellite markers. The mtDNA genetic distances between these populations and those of C. piliscapa and C. cursor were higher than those observed between populations of these two species (Eyer et al 2022). Surprisingly, it was even more distantly related to C. piliscapa, the species with the closest populations, than to C. italica (found only in southern Italy) (Fig.…”

“…To estimate the degree of isolation from the other populations of C. cursor and C. piliscapa, we 9 combined data from Eyer et al (2022) and our samples. We estimated Fst using an exact test in GenePop.…”

“…We estimated Fst using an exact test in GenePop. For comparisons with the C. piliscapa and C. cursor populations analysed by Eyer et al (2022), we also calculated the Gst matrix (Hedrick 2005), which corrects the Fst value for the observed within population diversity, using the R PopgenReport library (Gruber and Adamack 2022).…”

Semipermeable species boundaries create opportunities for gene flow and adaptive potential

“…The simplest explanation is that F. polyctena or F. rufa queens are forced to mate with F. aquilonia males due to a lack of conspecifics, because of differences in their abundance in Finland (Seifert, 2018), similarly to swordtail fish three-way hybridisation in Mexico (Banerjee et al, 2022). A complementary explanation is that since highly supercolonial F. aquilonia mates on top of or close to its nest (Seifert, 2018), workers protect the queens from nonconspecifics, as has been observed in other ant species (Eyer et al, 2023;Staab & Kleineidam, 2014).…”