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© 2018. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

The Acacia drepanolobium (also known as Vachellia drepanolobium) ant‐plant symbiosis is considered a classic case of species coexistence, in which four species of tree‐defending ants compete for nesting space in a single host tree species. Coexistence in this system has been explained by trade‐offs in the ability of the ant associates to compete with each other for occupied trees versus the ability to colonize unoccupied trees. We seek to understand the proximal reasons for how and why the ant species vary in competitive or colonizing abilities, which are largely unknown. In this study, we use RADseq‐derived SNPs to identify relatedness of workers in colonies to test the hypothesis that competitively dominant ants reach large colony sizes due to polygyny, that is, the presence of multiple egg‐laying queens in a single colony. We find that variation in polygyny is not associated with competitive ability; in fact, the most dominant species, unexpectedly, showed little evidence of polygyny. We also use these markers to investigate variation in mating behavior among the ant species and find that different species vary in the number of males fathering the offspring of each colony. Finally, we show that the nature of polygyny varies between the two commonly polygynous species, Crematogaster mimosae and Tetraponera penzigi: in C. mimosae, queens in the same colony are often related, while this is not the case for T. penzigi. These results shed light on factors influencing the evolution of species coexistence in an ant‐plant mutualism, as well as demonstrating the effectiveness of RADseq‐derived SNPs for parentage analysis.

Details

Title
Polygyny does not explain the superior competitive ability of dominant ant associates in the African ant‐plant, Acacia ( Vachellia ) drepanolobium
Author
Boyle, John H 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Martins, Dino J 2 ; Pelaez, Julianne 3 ; Musili, Paul M 4 ; Kibet, Staline 5 ; S. Kimani Ndung'u 6 ; Kenfack, David 7 ; Pierce, Naomi E 8 

 Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; Department of Biology, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA 
 Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; Mpala Research Centre, Nanyuki, Kenya; Turkana Basin Institute, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA 
 Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA 
 East African Herbarium, Botany Department, National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya 
 Department of Land Resource Management and Agricultural Technology, University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya 
 Mpala Research Centre, Nanyuki, Kenya 
 CTFS‐ForestGEO, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Washington, DC, USA 
 Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA 
Pages
1441-1450
Section
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Publication year
2018
Publication date
Feb 2018
Publisher
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
e-ISSN
20457758
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
1992790244
Copyright
© 2018. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.