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Two new species of socially parasitic Nylanderia ants from the southeastern United States.

ABSTRACT: In ants, social parasitism is an umbrella term describing a variety of life-history strategies, where a parasitic species depends entirely on a free-living species, for part of or its entire life-cycle, for either colony founding, survival, and/or reproduction. The highly specialized inquiline social parasites are fully dependent on their hosts for their entire lifecycles. Most inquiline species are tolerant of the host queen in the parasitized colony, forgo producing a worker caste, and invest solely in the production of sexual offspring. In general, inquilines are rare, and their geographic distribution is limited, making it difficult to study them. Inquiline populations appear to be small, cryptic, and they are perhaps ephemeral. Thus, information about their natural history is often fragmentary or non-existent but is necessary for understanding the socially parasitic life history syndrome in more detail. Here, we describe two new species of inquiline social parasites, Nylanderia deyrupi sp. nov. and Nylanderia parasitica sp. nov., from the southeastern United States, parasitizing Nylanderia wojciki and Nylanderia faisonensis, respectively. The formicine genus Nylanderia is large and globally distributed, but until the recent description of Nylanderia deceptrix, social parasites were unknown from this genus. In addition to describing the new social parasite species, we summarize the fragmentary information known about their biology, present a key to both the queens and the males of the Nylanderia social parasites, and discuss the morphology of the social parasites in the context of the inquiline syndrome.

SUBMITTER: Messer SJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7109158 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Two new species of socially parasitic <i>Nylanderia</i> ants from the southeastern United States.

Messer Steven J SJ Cover Stefan P SP Rabeling Christian C

ZooKeys 20200324

In ants, social parasitism is an umbrella term describing a variety of life-history strategies, where a parasitic species depends entirely on a free-living species, for part of or its entire life-cycle, for either colony founding, survival, and/or reproduction. The highly specialized inquiline social parasites are fully dependent on their hosts for their entire lifecycles. Most inquiline species are tolerant of the host queen in the parasitized colony, forgo producing a worker caste, and invest ...[more]

PMID: 32256149

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Project description:The southeastern region of the United States exhibits an unusual trend of decreasing tree species richness (TSR) from higher to lower latitudes over the Florida peninsula. This trend contradicts the widely marked latitudinal diversity gradient where species richness is highest in tropical zones and decreases towards extratropical regions. This study aims to assess the environmental factors that prompt this atypical inverse latitudinal gradient seen in TSR using the USDA Forest Service's Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) database. Fifteen variables under four categories of forested area, groundwater, soil properties, and climate groups were examined to model TSR in the region. Generalized linear models (GLMs) with Poisson distributions first assessed individual variables to test explanatory power then the LASSO regularization method was utilized to extract two subsets of the most influential variables to predict TSR. Forest area and four climate variables (mean annual temperature, precipitation seasonality, mean temperature of coldest quarter, and mean precipitation of driest quarter) were the top five variables during the initial GLM assessment implying their potential individual influence in regulating TSR. Two subsets of LASSO models contained seven and three predictor variables, respectively. Frist subset includes seven predictors, presented in highest to low standardized coefficient, mean temperature of coldest quarter, forested area, precipitation seasonality, mean precipitation of driest quarter, water table depth, spodosol, and available water storage. The other subset further excluded four lowest influential variables from the first set, leaving the top three variables from the first subset. The first subset of the LASSO model predicted TSR with 63.4% explained deviance while the second subset reproduced 60.2% of deviance explained. With only three variables used, the second model outperformed the first model evaluated by the AIC value. We conclude that forest patch area, mean temperature of coldest quarter, and precipitation seasonality are the highly influential variables of TSR among environmental factors in the southeastern region of U.S., but evolutionary or historic cause should be further incorporated to fully understand tree species diversity pattern in this region.

Dataset Information

Two new species of socially parasitic Nylanderia ants from the southeastern United States.

Publications

Two new species of socially parasitic <i>Nylanderia</i> ants from the southeastern United States.

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