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      How Much Variation Can One Ant Species Hold? Species Delimitation in the Crematogaster kelleri-Group in Madagascar

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      PLoS ONE
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          Abstract

          We investigated the species-level taxonomy of the Malagasy Crematogaster ( Crematogaster) kelleri-group and an additional more distantly related species of the same subgenus. Morphological data from worker, queen and male ants, as well as genetic data from three nuclear genes (long wavelength rhodopsin, arginine kinase and carbomoylphosphate synthase) and one mitochondrial marker (cytochrome oxidase I) led to the recognition of six species. Within the C. kelleri-group, three new species are described: C. hazolava Blaimer sp. n., C. hafahafa Blaimer sp. n. and C. tavaratra Blaimer sp. n. The previously described taxa C. kelleri Forel and C. madagascariensis André are validated by our analysis. Conversely, our data suggests synonymy of C. adrepens Forel (with C. kelleri) and C. gibba Emery (with C. madagascariensis). A more distantly related and phylogenetically isolated species, C. tsisitsilo Blaimer sp. n., is further described. We report high levels of morphological and molecular variation in C. kelleri and illustrate that this variation can be explained partly by geography. Species descriptions, images, distribution maps and identification keys based on worker ants, as well as on queen and male ants where available, are presented for all six species. Our work highlights the elevated species richness of Crematogaster ants throughout Madagascar’s humid forests, especially in the far northern tip of the island, and the need to use multiple data sources to ensure clear demarcation of this diversity.

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          Aligning conservation priorities across taxa in Madagascar with high-resolution planning tools.

          Globally, priority areas for biodiversity are relatively well known, yet few detailed plans exist to direct conservation action within them, despite urgent need. Madagascar, like other globally recognized biodiversity hot spots, has complex spatial patterns of endemism that differ among taxonomic groups, creating challenges for the selection of within-country priorities. We show, in an analysis of wide taxonomic and geographic breadth and high spatial resolution, that multitaxonomic rather than single-taxon approaches are critical for identifying areas likely to promote the persistence of most species. Our conservation prioritization, facilitated by newly available techniques, identifies optimal expansion sites for the Madagascar government's current goal of tripling the land area under protection. Our findings further suggest that high-resolution multitaxonomic approaches to prioritization may be necessary to ensure protection for biodiversity in other global hot spots.
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            Evaluating alternative hypotheses for the early evolution and diversification of ants.

            Ants are the world's most diverse and ecologically dominant eusocial organisms. Resolving the phylogeny and timescale for major ant lineages is vital to understanding how they achieved this success. Morphological, molecular, and paleontological studies, however, have presented conflicting views on early ant evolution. To address these issues, we generated the largest ant molecular phylogenetic data set published to date, containing approximately 6 kb of DNA sequence from 162 species representing all 20 ant subfamilies and 10 aculeate outgroup families. When these data were analyzed with and without outgroups, which are all distantly related to ants and hence long-branched, we obtained conflicting ingroup topologies for some early ant lineages. This result casts strong doubt on the existence of a poneroid clade as currently defined. We compare alternate attachments of the outgroups to the ingroup tree by using likelihood tests, and find that several alternative rootings cannot be rejected by the data. These alternatives imply fundamentally different scenarios for the early evolution of ant morphology and behavior. Our data strongly support several notable relationships within the more derived formicoid ants, including placement of the enigmatic subfamily Aenictogitoninae as sister to Dorylus army ants. We use the molecular data to estimate divergence times, employing a strategy distinct from previous work by incorporating the extensive fossil record of other aculeate Hymenoptera as well as that of ants. Our age estimates for the most recent common ancestor of extant ants range from approximately 115 to 135 million years ago, indicating that a Jurassic origin is highly unlikely.
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              The evolutionary consequences of biological invasions

              A major challenge of invasion biology is the development of a predictive framework that prevents new invasions. This is inherently difficult because different biological characteristics are important at the different stages of invasion: opportunity/transport, establishment and spread. Here, we draw from recent research on a variety of taxa to examine the evolutionary causes and consequences of biological invasions. The process of introduction may favour species with characteristics that promote success in highly disturbed, human-dominated landscapes, thus exerting novel forms of selection on introduced populations. Moreover, evidence is accumulating that multiple introductions can often be critical to the successful establishment and spread of introduced species, as they may be important sources of genetic variation necessary for adaptation in new environments or may permit the introduction of novel traits. Thus, not only should the introduction of new species be prevented, but substantial effort should also be directed to preventing the secondary introduction of previously established species (and even movement of individuals among introduced populations). Modern molecular techniques can take advantage of genetic changes postintroduction to determine the source of introduced populations and their vectors of spread, and to elucidate the mechanisms of success of some invasive species. Moreover, the growing availability of genomic tools will permit the identification of underlying genetic causes of invasive success.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1932-6203
                2013
                9 July 2013
                : 8
                : 7
                : e68082
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Entomology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., United States of America
                [2 ]Department of Entomology, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, California, United States of America
                [3 ]Department of Entomology, University of California Davis, Davis, California, United States of America
                Université Paris 13, France
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Conceived and designed the experiments: BBB BLF. Performed the experiments: BBB. Analyzed the data: BBB. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: BBB BLF. Wrote the paper: BBB BLF.

                Article
                PONE-D-13-04875
                10.1371/journal.pone.0068082
                3706601
                23874503
                13e9509f-cb86-4d27-a384-37dcbb697dda
                Copyright @ 2013

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 1 February 2013
                : 24 May 2013
                Page count
                Pages: 31
                Funding
                This research was funded by the National Science Foundation ( www.nsf.gov; grants DEB-0072713, DEB-0344731, DEB-0842395 to B.L.F., DEB-0842204 to P.S. Ward and DEB-1107515 to B.B.B. and P.S. Ward), the Entomology Department at UC Davis (entomology.ucdavis.edu; B.B.B.), the National Geographic Society ( www.nationalgeographic.com; W173-11 to B.B.B.) and the American Philosophical Society ( www.amphilsoc.org; Lewis & Clark grant to B.B.B.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Biology
                Computational Biology
                Sequence Analysis
                Ecology
                Biodiversity
                Evolutionary Biology
                Evolutionary Systematics
                Genetics
                Molecular Genetics
                Zoology
                Animal Phylogenetics
                Animal Taxonomy
                Entomology

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

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