Abstract
In myrmecophytes, plants with structures in which ants establish colonies, there is strong competition among ant queens for access to host plants. However, our knowledge of how queens of different partner species interact when attempting to colonize plants remains limited. The Amazonian myrmecophyte Maieta guianensis is colonized by queens of two ant species: Crematogaster laevis and Pheidole minutula. We elucidated the competitive ranking of queens of these species and tested the hypothesis that cooperative colony founding (pleometrosis) by P. minutula queens could alter this ranking. We found that C. laevis queens are behaviorally dominant to P. minutula when individual queens encounter each other. Despite being inferior in combat, however, P. minutula queens successfully colonized seedlings at similar rates whether they were placed alone or in concert with a C. laevis queen. This may have occurred because the smaller P. minutula queens frequently entered domatia before the more robust C. laevis queens. Although C. laevis queens can evict P. minutula queens that had previously colonized domatia, this was an infrequent phenomenon—perhaps because while not fatal, conflicts often resulted in serious injury. Furthermore, by colonizing the same plant cooperative P. minutula queens dramatically reduce the probability that C. laevis colonizes host-plants without reducing their own per capita rates of colonization success. To our knowledge, this is a novel benefit of pleometrosis, whose primary advantages have primarily been thought to occur after the critical stage of colony establishment. Given the decreased likelihood of colonization when faced with multiple P. minutula, it may be that C. laevis’ persistence at the landscape level is enhanced by such factors as priority effects, superior dispersal ability, or niche partitioning.
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Acknowledgments
We thank M. Stanton for comments on the manuscript and Waldete C. Lourenço, Wesley Dáttilo and Osmaildo F. da Silva for help in conducting the experiments. Financial support was provided by Brazil’s Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (Grants 552680/2006-0 and 490518/2006-0), and the US National Science Foundation (grants DEB-0452720 and DEB-0453631). This is publication 529 in the BDFFP technical series.
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Izzo, T.J., Bruna, E.M., Vasconcelos, H.L. et al. Cooperative colony founding alters the outcome of interspecific competition between Amazonian plant-ants. Insect. Soc. 56, 341–345 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00040-009-0029-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00040-009-0029-x