Warm and arid regions of the world are hotspots of superorganism complexity

Richelière, Frédérique La; Muñoz, Gabriel; Guénard, Benoit; Dunn, Robert R.; Economo, Evan P.; Powell, Scott; Sanders, Nathan J.; Weiser, Michael D.; Abouheif, Ehab; Lessard, Jean

doi:10.1098/rspb.2021.1899

Cited by 12 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 67 publications

(85 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The poor performance of these climate specialists during peak ant activity times suggests that thermal tolerance is costly. Recent work further suggests that persistence in extremely hot and dry climate also favours ant species exhibiting worker polymorphism, perhaps owing to size‐related differences in thermal tolerance within the colony (La Richelière et al, 2022 ).…”

Section: Key Ecological Strategies Of Ants That Parallel Those Of Plantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecological strategies of (pl)ants: Towards a world‐wide worker economic spectrum for ants

et al. 2022

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

1. Current global challenges call for a rigorously predictive ecology. Our understanding of ecological strategies, imputed through suites of measurable functional traits, comes from decades of work that largely focussed on plants.However, a key question is whether plant ecological strategies resemble those of other organisms.2. Among animals, ants have long been recognised to possess similarities with plants: as (largely) central place foragers. For example, individual ant workers play similar foraging roles to plant leaves and roots and are similarly expendable. Frameworks that aim to understand plant ecological strategies through key functional traits, such as the 'leaf economics spectrum', offer the potential for significant parallels with ant ecological strategies.3. Here, we explore these parallels across several proposed ecological strategy dimensions, including an 'economic spectrum', propagule size-number tradeoffs, apparency-defence trade-offs, resource acquisition trade-offs and stresstolerance trade-offs. We also highlight where ecological strategies may differ between plants and ants. Furthermore, we consider how these strategies play out among the different modules of eusocial organisms, where selective forces act on the worker and reproductive castes, as well as the colony.4. Finally, we suggest future directions for ecological strategy research, including highlighting the availability of data and traits that may be more difficult to measure, but should receive more attention in future to better understand the ecological strategies of ants. The unique biology of eusocial organisms provides an unrivalled opportunity to bridge the gap in our understanding of ecological

show abstract

Section: Key Ecological Strategies Of Ants That Parallel Those Of Plantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecological strategies of (pl)ants: Towards a world‐wide worker economic spectrum for ants

et al. 2022

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A larger number of within‐colony replicates could provide a more robust estimation of variance and perhaps affect the variance–environment relationship (Gaudard et al, 2019). Furthermore, colony‐level trait adaptation and plasticity along environmental gradients provides an interesting avenue for future research (Gibb et al, 2022; Ibarra‐Isassi et al, 2021; la Richelière et al, 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Community‐wide trait adaptation, but not plasticity, explains ant community structure in extreme environments

2022

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

1. Quantifying trait-environment associations can help elucidate the processes underpinning the structure of species assemblages. However, most work has focused on trait variation across rather than within species, meaning that processes operating at the intraspecific levels cannot be detected. Incorporating intraspecific trait variation in community-wide analyses can provide valuable insights about the role of morphological adaptation and plasticity on species persistence and the composition of ecological communities.2. Here, we assessed geographical variation in the direction (i.e. adaptation) and strength of selection, and the magnitude of plasticity, by examining communitywide trait variation in ant communities along an environmental gradient spanning 9° latitude in Quebec, Canada. Specifically, we measured 9 morphological traits related to foraging strategies, resource use and thermal regulation at 20 locations across temperate and boreal forests. We then examined how the mean and variance of these traits varied along temperature and precipitation gradients. Moreover, we examined how these trait-environment relationships varied across levels of organization, from individual workers (intraspecific) to colonies (intraspecific) and species (interspecific).3. We observed changes in mean trait values along environmental gradients, but very little change in variance. Specifically, we observed a decrease in the mean length of antennae and an increase in the mean eye length from mild (warm and wet) to more extreme environments (cold and dry). These shifts in trait means were mostly coordinated across organizational levels (i.e. worker, colony and species). We also observed a general increase in trait variance from mild to extreme environments, but only at the species level. 4. Our findings suggest that stressful environmental conditions exert a strong selection pressure on ant morphology causing shifts in optimal trait values. These adaptations may enable persistence at the northern edge of the boreal forest and therefore influence the composition of these ant communities. Specifically, ants with large eyes and short antennae are overrepresented at the transition zone between the boreal forest and the tundra, possibly representing an adaptation to these more open habitats. Our study demonstrates that combining

show abstract

“…Following Meurville et al bioRxiv, to face heterogeneity in data collection, we split colony size by quartile which were used as a continuous trait (1st quartile: under 60 individuals, 2nd quartile: 60-268, 3rd quartile: 269-2000, 4th quartile: 2001-3060x10 5 ). The presence of polymorphic workers was compiled from La Richelière et al (2022).…”

Section: Social Complexity Traitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ruling the unruly: Innovation in ant larval feeding led to increased caste dimorphism and social complexity

Matte

LeBoeuf

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Differences between reproductive and worker castes are essential to eusocial societies. The morphological chasm between castes is highly heterogeneous across the ant phylogeny. The low size dimorphism of basal ant lineages suggests that evolutionary innovations occurred during the diversification of ants, potentially enabling their major evolutionary transition from simple eusocial societies to superorganisms. We measured queen and worker body volumes of 321 ant species belonging to 124 genera and 13 subfamilies to investigate the correlation between dimorphism and a panel of traits linked to complex eusociality. Using comparative phylogenetic methods, we show that higher dimorphism is associated with large colony sizes, distinct worker subcastes, and the loss of worker ability to mate. However, these traits correlate with both dimorphism and body volume variations of female castes. In contrast, larval morphology associated with passive larval behavior correlates only with dimorphism and not body volume variations of queens and workers. We argue that creating a large size differential between totipotent larvae with identical reproductive aspirations requires firm colony control over larval caste fate, which can only be exerted if larval nutrition is regulated by workers. We suggest that the evolutionary innovation of individualized worker-to-larva feeding, for example through trophallaxis, brought about passive larvae in some major ant lineages. Our results indicate that resolution of the conflict between larval reproductive aspirations and colony priorities was a necessary step in the evolution of complex eusocial societies.

show abstract

Warm and arid regions of the world are hotspots of superorganism complexity

Cited by 12 publications

References 67 publications

Ecological strategies of (pl)ants: Towards a world‐wide worker economic spectrum for ants

Ecological strategies of (pl)ants: Towards a world‐wide worker economic spectrum for ants

Community‐wide trait adaptation, but not plasticity, explains ant community structure in extreme environments

Ruling the unruly: Innovation in ant larval feeding led to increased caste dimorphism and social complexity

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About