Maintaining Diversity in an Ant Community: Modeling, Extending, and Testing the Dominance‐Discovery Trade‐Off

Ant communities often consist of many species with apparently similar niches. We present a mathematical model of the dominance‐discovery trade‐off, the trade‐off between the abilities to find and to control resources, showing that it can in principle facilitate the coexistence of large numbers of sp...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American naturalist 2007-03, Vol.169 (3), p.323-333
Main Authors: Adler, F. R., LeBrun, E. G., Feener Jr, D. H.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal and plant ecology
Animal, plant and microbial ecology
Animals
Ants
Ants - genetics
Ants - parasitology
Behavior, Animal
Biodiversity
Biological and medical sciences
Competitive Behavior
Computer Simulation
Diptera - physiology
Ecological competition
Ecosystem studies
Food security
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
General aspects
General aspects. Techniques
Genetic Fitness
Host-Parasite Interactions
Insect colonies
Insect communities
Insect traps
Insects
Mathematical models
Methods and techniques (sampling, tagging, trapping, modelling...)
Modeling
Models, Biological
Parametric models
Parasites
Parasitoids
Species diversity
Tradeoff analysis
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Summary:Ant communities often consist of many species with apparently similar niches. We present a mathematical model of the dominance‐discovery trade‐off, the trade‐off between the abilities to find and to control resources, showing that it can in principle facilitate the coexistence of large numbers of species. Baiting studies of dominance and discovery abilities in an ant community from the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona indicate that real communities fail to fit the assumptions of the simple model in several ways: (1) dominance depends on the size of the food resource; (2) for some ants, dominance depends on the presence or absence of specialist parasitoids; (3) pairwise dominance is not an all‐or‐nothing trait; and (4) a consistent negative relationship between pairwise differences in per capita discovery rates and dominance can be detected for only one bait type. Extended models incorporating these factors successfully predict the coexistence of five of the six most abundant members of this community but fail to accurately predict their relative abundances. Sensitivity analysis indicates that each complicating factor enhances the extent of coexistence.
ISSN:0003-0147
1537-5323
DOI:10.1086/510759