- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Unfortunately, those ant encounters neither cement good relationships with the family of ants, Formicidae, nor the world's family of ant researchers, known as myrmecologists.
“All myrmecologists are united by stories of meeting people and having them ask what they should do to get rid of the ants,” says ant specialist Brendon Boudinot, a doctoral student in Phil Ward's Department of Entomology and Nematology lab, University of California, Davis.
Boudinot, who recently won a first-place President's Award for his presentation on “Revising Our Vision of Ant Biodiversity: Male Ants of the New World” at the 2014 Entomological Society of America meeting in Portland, Ore., is passionate about ants, particularly male ants.
Like the late Rodney Dangerfield who proclaimed “I don't get no respect,” male ants get little respect or attention, said Boudinot, who aims to raise public awareness of their importance and demystify them through his scientific research.
“There are about 12,800 living species of ants described to date,” explained Boudinot, who enrolled in the UC Davis doctoral program after receiving his bachelor's degree at Evergreen State College, Olympia, Wash., in 2012. “Males are known for only 27 percent of these species, and no identification resource exists for identifying male ants for most bioregions.”
Addressing this concern, he provided the first male-based identification keys to subfamily and genus level for the New World. The keys cover 13 of the 16 subfamilies and 151 of the 324 genera. This, coupled with a global male-based key to all 16 ant subfamilies he submitted in November, will enable male ants to be identified by genus in the New World---encompassing North, Central, and South America---for the first time.
Boudinot's first research publication, “The Male Genitalia of Ants: Musculature, Homology, and Functional Morphology (Hymenoptera: Aculeata: Formicidae),” conducted as an undergraduate, appeared in the January 2013 volume of The Journal of Hymenoptera Research). Subsequently, he guest-blogged about the research for Alex Wild's Myrmecos column. Wild, now with the University of Texas, holds a doctorate in entomology from UC Davis and is an alumnus of the Phil Ward lab.
As for telling the difference between a male and a female ant, that's not easy, even for many ant researchers, Boudinot acknowledged. “Males and reproductive females, queens, usually have wings and look different from workers. Males are usually differentiated from females by having slightly different morphology. Besides having complex and strange genitalia, male ants also tend to have one more antennal segment, larger eyes, and in general look more ‘waspy.' "
The genitalia of male ants are fascinating, he said. “Think of a Leatherman or Swiss Army knife which has paired muscular claspers, graspers, and sawblades. Male ants have evolved winglessness and worker-like morphology at least five times in the ants, which has historically led to the accidental description of these wingless males as new species. This is a weird phenomenon which I will be focusing on for a chapter of my dissertation. Why have they evolved winglessness? What are the evolutionary patterns of skeletomuscular reduction? Are there trade-offs for a colony when they lose the ability to produce dispersing males? Anyway, this should be fun.”
In addition to the United States, Boudinot has studied ants in four Latin American countries: Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama, and Brazil. “Ant-wise, my colleagues and I have collected numerous new species,” he said. A surprising example is a new species of Aphaenogaster he collected in 2010 in the foothills of Mt. Diablo, outside of Danville. He discovered it in a cow pasture less than 100 feet from suburban sprawl in a densely populated part of the state. On a recent trip to Brazil, he discovered the male of the martian ant (Martialis heureka) which is remarkable, as the martian ant is arguably the earliest branching lineage of living ants and yields important implications about the evolution of ants.
Boudinot looks forward to more ant collecting trips, especially to Brazil. “I really liked visiting Brazil because I had to teach myself Portuguese, had a tiny budget, was traveling alone, met awesome people, and visited some great places,” he recalled. “I worked in museums in São Paulo, Curitiba (in the South East), and Manaus in the Amazon basin. I got to see the Amazon river and rainforest (and ants), discovered some important things for my dissertation, and spent time with amazing people!”
Boudinot became enthralled with ants while volunteering as an undergraduate for a major research project, Leaf Litter Arthropods of Mesoamerica (LLAMA). “Initially I was saddled with the job of sorting and curating hundreds of samples which contained thousands and thousands of ants, but later I became involved in the field expedition to Honduras and independent research,” he said. “In one day I ended up individually counting over 8,000 specimens; at this point I forgot why my mentor made me count them. I was drawn to ants by their spectacular form and variation; every third genus of ants has some bizarre modification of the mandibles, or some weird structure on their body which is mysterious and in many cases simply unexplained. It took me a long time to become familiar with ants, but eventually I developed expertise in male ants, which very few people study.”
Why should people get interested in ants? “Ants are incredibly diverse social animals, with over 12,800 species and many more to be described,” the UC Davis myrmecologist said. “Their biology is spectacular; for example, their diet ranges from granivory and predation to agriculture. Ants invented agriculture about 55 million years before humans evolved, refining their agricultural practices to a remarkable degree at least 20 million years ago. (These are the famous leaf cutter ants and their relatives, see Wikipedia for some more information about them.) Ants are known to be agriculturally important in various parts of the world, are used in food dishes in Latin America and Southeast Asia, and are a critical system for studying sociality and numerous evolutionary and ecological questions.”
Boudinot noted that the inaccurate portrayals of ants in Hollywood movies lead to lifelong misinterpretations. “There is a perception that there are two kinds of ants: red ants and black ants--and sometimes yellow ants--and that the workers of ants include both sexes, as in the Disney movies A Bug's Life and Antz,” Boudinot said. “Really, ants are incredibly diverse---which is why I am fascinated with them in part.”
Reproductory misinformation abounds in “A Bug's Life,” the 1998 American computer-animated comedy adventure film, Boudinot said. All worker ants are female and sterile, but Princess Atta marries a male, Flik. “Flik and Princess Atta wouldn't have married, and if they did, Flik wouldn't be the dad as chances are she, as a worker, would be able to lay only unfertilized eggs which would become clonal males.”
If there's one thing that Boudinot wants youngsters of today to know about ants, it's this: “There are remarkable things to discover everywhere, and unanswered questions abound. Discovery is borne out of observation, and there is so much to observe in any single square meter of Earth's surface. I like ants in this respect because they are everywhere! In tropical rainforests ants and termites (another group of social insects) may make up to one-third of the total animal biomass, dwarfing that of vertebrates such as panthers, birds, and amphibians. There are about 90 species of ants in Sonoma, Napa, Yolo, and Sacramento counties alone, including fungus-cultivating ants!”
Boudinot encourages people to check out AntWeb.org. “This website is a digital database of thousands and thousands of species of ants, many of which look like they are extraterrestrials or are strange beasts out of nightmares,” he said, adding “Okay, and some of which are just fluffy and adorable.”
Ants and honey bees, which belong to the same order, Hymenoptera, are more similar than once believed. “In 2013 scientists discovered that ants are more closely related to bees and bee-like wasps than to yellowjackets and other wasps,” Boudinot said. “Our knowledge of this relationship is so new that we haven't even had time to reevaluate their physical similarity.”
“Ants are terrestrial, with a suite of adaptations for walking, while bees are highly efficient flyers. Bees are much more diverse than most people believe. In addition to the honey bee, there are about 20,000 described species of bees, not all of which are highly social like the honey bee! Unlike bees, there are no known non-social species of ants.”
“Bees are critical pollinators; ants are really poor pollinators. Ants are really good at protecting plants, though. Tight ant-plant mutualism has evolved several times, with the plants providing homes and food for ants while the ants provide protection for the plants from insect and vertebrate herbivores as well as competitor plants.”
After receiving his doctorate in entomology, Boudinot aspires “to be a professor so that I may continue to do research and to fulfill my love of teaching and mentoring.”
In the meantime, “I am just trying to learn as many valuable skills as I can while feeding my burning fascination with ants and insects in general. I have gained so much in terms of learning how to see and think about the natural world. Above all, I want to communicate this knowledge to people in whatever manner I can.”
“There is a logic to the biological universe,” Boudinot said, “and once you start to pick up this logic, interpreting the complex tapestry of life becomes a routine and deeply enjoyable task.”
(Editor's Note: More information on the ant images above: These are all males of the subfamily Leptanillinaea. This plate appears in Brendon Boudinot's manuscript, "Contributions to the Knowledge of Formicidae (Hymenoptera, Aculeata, Formicidae): A New Diagnosis of the Family, the First Global Male-Based Key to Subfamilies, and a Treatment of Early Branching Lineages" which he submitted to the European Journal of Taxonomy in November. "They have highly variably and spectacular morphology, and are extremely poorly known," he said. "Some of these males are so highly modified that they violate the diagnosis of the Formicidae." The genera: A, B, and D are Protanilla; C is a Leptanilla; E is Scyphodon; and F is Noonilla.)
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Host is graduate student Katharina Ullmann of the Neal Williams lab. Plans are to video-record the seminar for later posting on UCTV.
"Citizen Science is a powerful tool that scientists can use to harness the power of the public," Lucky says. "Public participation in science offers both scientific and educational benefits, including the possibility of massive and openly accessible data. This approach holds the promise of a new way of doing science and a new way of learning science, but also poses challenges of organization, quality control and funding. Two projects, the School of Ants and Backyard Bark Beetles, were developed to address the main concerns with Citizen Science projects, and demonstrate how modern public participation in science can be an effective tool for teaching science and investigating topics including, but not limited to biodiversity, invasive species, population genetics, and systematics."
Lucky describes herself as "an insect systematist and science communicator with a particular interest in ants and citizen science."
Lucky, a graduate of Brown University, Providence, R.I., with a bachelor's degree in biology, with honors, received her doctorate in entomology from UC Davis in 2010, working with major professor/ant specialist Phil Ward.
She joined the University of Florida in 2012 after serving as a postdoctoral researcher and director of the School of Ants citizen science project from 2010 to 2012 in the Department of Biology, North Carolina State University (NCSU). In 2009-10, she worked with Conservation International, Rapid Assessment Program, conducting ant biodiversity surveys in Papua, New Guinea: field collections, specimen sorting, curation and analysis.
Lucky was an invited speaker at the 2012 International Congress of Entomology, Daegu, South Korea, Aug 2012. She has also presented her work at the Entomological Society of America (ESA), and Pacific Branch of ESA and has taught numerous classes, seminars and workshops. At UC Davis, she designed a course on “Insects and the Media,” which she taught in the spring of 2006 and the fall of 2008.
Among her honors and awards:
- Global Change Award, NCSU Global Change Forum/NC Museum of Natural Sciences, 2011
- Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award, UC Davis, 2009
- Center for Population Biology Research Awards, UC Davis, 2007, 2009
- Australian Biological Resource Study Grant, with principal investigator P.S. Ward, UC Davis, 2007-2008
- Australian Biological Resource Study Grant, with principal investigator P.S. Ward, UC Davis, 2007-2008
- Jastro-Shields Research Award, UC Davis, 2006, 2007, 2008
- Center for BioSystematics Research Grant, UC Davis, 2005
- UC Davis Dept. of Entomology Fellowships, Vansell 2005, MacBeth 2005
- Fulbright Fellow, Quito, Ecuador, 2000-2002
- William Gaston Premium Scholarship in biology, Brown University, Providence, RI, 2000
Lucky is a member of the Entomological Society of America, Society for Systematic Biology, Society for Conservation Biology, American Association of University Women, Association of Women in Science, and American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Her latest peer-reviewed publications include:
Hulcr, J., Latimer, A.J., Rountree, N.R., Fierer, N., Lucky, A., Lowman, M.D., Henley, J.B. and Dunn, R.R. (Submitted to PLoS One). It's a Jungle in There: Bacteria in Belly Buttons are Highly Diverse, but Predictable.
Guenard, B. and A. Lucky (2011). Shuffling leaf litter samples produces more accurate and precise snapshots of terrestrial arthropod community composition. Environmental Entomology 40: 1523-1529.
Lucky, A. (2011).Molecular phylogeny and biogeography of the spider ants, genus Leptomyrmex Mayr (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 59: 281-292.
Lucky, A., E.M. Sarnat and L.E. Alonso (2011). Survey of the ants of the Muller Range of Papua New Guinea. RAP Bulletin of Biological Assessment 60: 45-53.
Lucky, A., K. Sagata and E.M. Sarnat (2011). Survey of the ants of the Nakanai Mountains of East New Britain, Papua New Guinea. RAP Bulletin of Biological Assessment 60: 158-157.
Lucky, A. and P.S. Ward (2010). Taxonomic revision of the ant genus Leptomyrmex Mayr. Zootaxa 2688:1-67.
Lucky, A. and E.M. Sarnat. (2010). Biogeography and diversification of the Pacific ant genus Lordomyrma Emery. Journal of Biogeography 37: 624-634.
Lucky, A. 2009.Urb-ants (Book review of Urban Ants of North America And Europe by Klotz et al., 2008). Systematic Entomology 34: 406-407.
Lucky, A. and E.M. Sarnat. 2007.New species of Lordomyrma (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) from Southeast Asia and Fiji. Zootaxa1681: 37–46 (2008).
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Snelling, 74, an internationally known entomologist who primarily studied ants, wasps and bees and worked in collections at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County for more than three decades, left behind an unfinished manuscript when he died April 21, 2008 while on an ant expedition in Kenya.
His work included 10 new species of Temnothorax ants, mostly from California but also from Nevada and Baja, California.
Today it is seeing the light of day, thanks to two ant specialists at the University of California, Davis: Marek Borowiec and Matthew Prebus of the UC Department of Entomology and Nematology. They recently published the work, with Snelling listed as a co-author, in ZooKeys and linked each described specimen to the AntWeb database.
Snelling's son, Gordon, gave the draft to Borowiec and Prebus to complete and publish. Both are doctoral candidates in the Phil Ward lab.
The 10 new species of a Temnothorax ants doubles the number of species of this genus in California.
The era of electronic publishing in taxonomy has greatly facilitated the accessibility of specimen data, the entomologists said. ZooKeys has been long spearheaded the wide and rapid dissemination of taxonomic information.
"We include 20 species known from California in our study but at present, there are about 60 species, including those described, of Temnothorax known from North America and more than 350 species worldwide so our study is of somewhat limited scope,” the authors said in a news release. "Nevertheless, we believe that by officially describing these forms and giving a new illustrated key, we are providing a useful resource for myrmecologists working in western North America."
AntWeb is an online ant database that focuses on specimen level data and images linked to specimens. In addition, contributors can submit natural history information and field images that are linked directly to taxonomic names. Distribution maps and field guides are generated automatically. All data in AntWeb are downloadable by users.
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM) where Snelling worked, houses more than 35 million specimens, some dating back 4.5 billion years. Snelling built up the ant collection there.
Roy Snelling "is one of the most significant figures in modern myrmecology," wrote ant specialist/insect photographer Alex Wild in his Myrmecos blog. Wild holds a doctorate in entomology from UC Davis, where he studied with major professor Phil Ward.
Snelling, born of Cherokee Indian heritage in 1934 in Turlock, was basically a self-taught entomologist. He studied at a junior college in Modesto and later in life, did graduate-level studies at the University of Kansas. Snelling served in the U.S. Army and was an inspector with the California Department of Food and Agriculture before joining NHM.
Wrote Wild: "Roy's prolific career as a curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County produced dozens of studies on the taxonomy of bees, wasps, and especially ants. Among other accomplishments, his works are the primary reference for the honeypot ants of North America, numerous groups of carpenter ants, and the entire Chilean myrmecofauna. Roy was a devoted desert rat, an aficionado of fine Mexican food, and- and I mean this in the very best way- a curmudgeon's curmudgeon."
Borowiec, a fourth-year doctoral student, joined the UC Davis entomology graduate program in 2010. He received his master's degree, with honors, in zoology in 2009 from the University of Wroclaw, Poland. His thesis focused on the taxonomy of Cerapachys sexspinus group.
Prebus, a third-year Ph.D student, received his bachelor of science degree in biology from Evergreen State College, Olympia, Wash., in 2010 and then joined the Phil Ward lab. His research goals are to investigate when--and where--the hyperdiverse ant genus Temnothorax arose, and how it diversified on a global scale. Additionally, he willl revise the members of the genus from the Neotropical biogeographical region and investigate the relationship among members of the genus on the mainland and the Greater Antilles.
Links to their work:
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- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
His project, “Understanding a Landmark Social Insect Radiation: Comparative Analysis, Phylogenomics and Morphology of Dorylomorph Ants,” is a two-year grant funded for $19,932.
“Army ants are some of the most striking organisms found in warm temperate and tropical regions of the world,” Borowiec wrote in his abstract. “They are the most important invertebrate predators of the tropics, making them key species in rainforest ecosystems. This research will reconstruct the evolutionary history of army ants and their close relatives. The family tree of these ants, their geographic origins and the timeline of the evolution of traits that account for their ecological dominance will be investigated.”
Borowiec will construct an evolutionary tree from the ants' DNA, using latest advances in molecular biology and bioinformatics. “This tree will then serve as a framework for testing hypotheses on the evolution of army ant characteristics,” he wrote. “This study will also provide a new framework for identification of army ants and closely related species.”
“This project will not only bring insights into the history of an ecologically important group of insects but also help to understand how the latest advances in molecular biology, statistics and computer science can improve our knowledge of evolutionary processes. New resources allowing easier and more accurate identification of these ants will aid other biologists and conservation specialists in decision making and planning further research on the group.”
Borowiec, who has studied with major professor Phil Ward since September 2010, received his master's degree, with honors, in zoology in 2009 from the University of Wroclaw, Poland. His thesis focused on the taxonomy of Cerapachys sexspinus group. He received his bachelor of science degree, with honors, in biological sciences/zoology in 2007, also from the University of Wrocław.
He has published his peer-reviewed research in ZooKeys, Journal of Hymenoptera Research Myrmecological News and Polish Journal of Entomology, among others.
Among his mostly published research:
Snelling R.S., Borowiec M.L., Prebus M.M. 2014. Studies on California ants: new species in the genus Temnothorax Mayr (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). ZooKeys, 372: 27-89.
Johnson B.R., Borowiec M.L., Chiu J.C., Lee E.K., Atallah J.,Ward P.S. 2013. Phylogenomics resolves the puzzle of evolutionary relationships among ants, bees, and wasps. ZooKeys 23:2058-2062.
Borowiec M.L., Borowiec L. 2013. New data on the occurrence of ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) in Lower Silesia and other regions of Poland [in Polish with English summary] Wiadomości Entomologiczne,32:49-57.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Using state-of-the-art genome sequencing and bioinformatics, the researchers resolved a long-standing, unanswered evolutionary question. Scientists previously thought that ants and bees were more distantly related, with ants being closer to certain parasitoid wasps.
Ants, bees and stinging wasps all belong to the aculeate (stinging) Hymenoptera clade -- the group in which social behavior is most extensively developed, said senior author and ant specialist Phil Ward, professor of entomology at UC Davis.
"Despite great interest in the ecology and behavior of these insects, their evolutionary relationships have never been fully clarified. In particular, it has been uncertain how ants—the world’s most successful social insects—are related to bees and wasps," Ward said. "We were able to resolve this question by employing next-generation sequencing technology and advances in bioinformatics. This phylogeny, or evolutionary tree, provides a new framework for understanding the evolution of nesting, feeding and social behavior in Hymenoptera."
“With a phylogeny or evolutionary progression that we think is reliable and robust, we can now start to understand how various morphological and/or behavioral traits evolved in these groups of insects, and even examine the genetic basis of these phenotypic changes,” Chiu said.
Johnson, whose lab studies the genetics, behavior, evolution and health of honeybees, noted that the study showed that ants and bees are more closely related than previously thought.
The scientists combined data from the transcriptome -- showing which genes are active and being transcribed from DNA into RNA-- and genomic (DNA) data from a number of species of ants, bees and wasps, including bradynobaenid wasps, a cuckoo wasp, a spider wasp, a scoliid wasp, a mud dauber wasp, a tiphiid wasp, a paper wasp and a pollen wasp; a velvet ant (wasp); a dracula ant; and a sweat bee, Lasioglossum albipes.
Of particular interest was the finding that ants are a sister group to the Apoidea, a major group within Hymenoptera that includes bees and sphecid wasps (a family of wasps that includes digger wasps and mud daubers).
The UC Davis results also provide a new perspective on lower Cretaceous fossil Cariridris bipetiolata, originally claimed to be the oldest fossil ant. Scientists later reinterpreted it to be a spheciform wasp.
“Our discovery that ants and apoids are sister taxa helps to explain difficulty in the placement of Cariridris,” the authors wrote in the paper, “and suggests that it is best treated as a lineage close to the root of the ant-apoid tree, perhaps not assignable with certainty to either branch.”
The scientists discovered that the ancestral aculeate wasp was likely an ectoparasitoid, which attacks and paralyzes a host insect and leaves its offspring nearby where they can attach to the outside of the host and feed from it.
The research drew financial support from UC Davis.