AToL: Collaborative Research on Ant Phylogeny: A Comprehensive Evolutionary Tree for the World's Premier Social Organisms

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AbstractEF 0431330Philip Ward, University of California at DavisOriginating in the Cretaceous Period and outliving the dinosaurs, ants are one of the greatest success stories in the history of life on Planet Earth. Numbering approximately 20,000 species, ants dominate many terrestrial environments and in some habitats they constitute 15 to 20% of the total weight of all animals combined. Perhaps the major factor contributing to the ubiquity and importance of ants is their complex, cooperative societies. Ants are involved in intimate biological interactions with countless other organisms, and exhibit many remarkable behaviors, including agriculture of fungi, harvesting of seeds, herding and "milking" of other insects, cooperative hunting in packs, slave-making, and communal nest weaving. The parallels between these behaviors in ants and those found in humans have inspired public and scientific curiosity alike. Human understanding of ants suffers, unfortunately, from a lack of scientific research on ant history and genetics. This research project will remedy this problem by reconstructing the history of ants, from the Age of Dinosaurs to the present, using evidence both from ant anatomy and ant DNA. Techniques unavailable to previous generations of ant researchers, such as PCR amplification and DNA sequencing of genes, will be used to gather molecular data. Some of these data will come from newly discovered genes, which will also yield broad insights about the genetics of other animals. These data will be analyzed using state-of-the-art computing algorithms and hardware in order to reconstruct the "family tree" of all major lineages of ants. Dates for major events in the history of ants will be inferred by combining fossil evidence with molecular dating techniques. These results will be integrated with the large body of pre-existing data on ant ecology and behavior, in order to cast new light on ant biology and to suggest new pathways for future investigation.This project will have a substantial impact on both science and society. This work will involve university and museum faculty, postdoctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, and technical staff who will interact during all stages of the project with an international team of scientific collaborators. The study of ant biology occupies a central role in a diverse number of disciplines including ecology, conservation biology, molecular biology and genetics, chemical communication, biodiversity studies, and artificial intelligence research. As just one example, ant diversity has become a leading indicator of habitat quality in conservation biology, so a better understanding of the history and genetics of ants will increase our ability to make informed conservation decisions. The information generated by this project will be disseminated through scientific publications, as well as through a book geared towards a more general audience. The scientific results from this project also will be presented in user-friendly internet interfaces on the World-Wide Web, which will be made available to all interested members of the scientific community and the general public.