FY2012 Annual Report

This project is a collaboration between OIST and U. of Michigan, funded by the National Science Foundation (USA).  The first phase of the project is to generate a well-resolved phylogeny of the genus with representative taxa from around the globe, and more comprehensive sampling from our main area of interest; Indo-Malaya and Melanesia.  In FY2012, in collaboration with the Knowles lab at U. of Michigan, we developed a dataset of genetic from from of over 600 samples from 300 species, and curated and identified a corresponding voucher collection.  We are currently finalizing phylogenetic analyses and preparing the results for publication.

In a parallel effort, we have created several datasets that complement the phylogenetic dataset and will be used for comparative analysis.  In our lab at OIST, we imaged over 1000 specimens with standard views.  We developed a system of geometric morphometric landmarks and a suite of discrete and continuous character data, and recorded data for all species in our study.  In addition, we have compiled a comprehensive database of distributional data for species in the genus.  Our next task is to use these datasets to test integrated hypotheses for the joint evolutionary dynamics of morphology, ecological habit, and biogeographic distribution in the genus.  We also will continue to develop techniques for 3D morphometrics.

Our understanding of large-scale biodiversity patterns is strongly biased towards a few groups of vertebrates and plants, while at the opposite, studies on insects, by far the most diverse organisms, are scarce. To address this gap in our knowledge, the Global Ant Biodiversity Informatics project (GABI) aim to compile over 200 years of ant research into a single database providing distribution information for all ant species. This will allow assessing our current knowledge, and to predict present and future distribution of all species; and when combined, analyze ant diversity across large scales. Questions relative to the ecological and evolutionary patterns of ants will be addressed at the light of the distribution of other organism groups, gradients of environmental factors or of specific biological traits (e.g. size).  In FY2012 we focused intensively on our goal, and have collected over 400,000 ant occurrence records.  At current progress, the data aggregation phase should be complete in FY2013.

Ants are among the most ubiquitous and ecologically dominant animal groups. Over millions of years, ant biodiversity has evolved and dispersed through the vast network of Pacific islands.  More recently, humans have unintentionally introduced many species from around the globe into the Pacific. We seek to understand the historical and contemporary processes that regulate ant biodiversity over time.  

In this fiscal year, our lab published several papers that represented the culmination of a great deal of work over the last few years, including one paper “Revisiting the ants of Melanesia and the taxon cycle” (Economo & Sarnat, 2012, Am. Nat.) that won the Presidential Award from the American Society of Naturalists.  Second our book The Ants of Fiji (Sarnat & Economo, 2012) was published by the University of California Press.  Third, we continue our work of aggregating and documenting ant biodiversity across the broader pacific, publishing a checklist of the ants of the Solomon Islands.  We also aggregated data for East Asia and Japanese islands and have a manuscript about to be submitted in a project led by research intern Patricia Wepfer.  In FY2013 we expect to complete a well-groomed dataset on island ant communities across the Pacific.  Ongoing work is focused on applications of population genomic methods to understand the assembly and dynamics of ecological communities using new high-throughput sequencing technologies.

We continue our work developing theoretical approaches to understanding biodiversity dynamics.  In FY2012 we continued work on network models of spatial biodiversity processes, and applications to diversity dynamics in general across social and biological systems. We entered new collaborations on this front, stay tuned for more developments!