NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2017: Historical Dynamics of Native Ant Communities of the Southeastern U.S.: Community Responses to Invasion by Exotic Ant Species

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This is an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology, under the program Research Using Biological Collections. The fellow, Doug Booher, is conducting research and receiving training that utilizes biological collections in innovative ways, and is being mentored by two sponsoring scientists at two host institutions: Corrie Moreau (Field Museum of Natural History) and Andrew Suarez (University of Illinois). The fellow's research aims to describe and explain the changes in the abundance, distribution, and diversity of native species as non-native species arrived and spread. Human-caused transport of non-native plants and animals is moving species at unprecedented rates across the globe. These introduced species are the second leading cause of extinctions. Therefore, understanding how invasive species impact ecological communities over different time scales is a major question in ecological research. In Florida, approximately 25% of 239 ant species are non-native and about half these introductions happened in the last 35 years. The fellow is assessing the impact of invasive ant species, using very large and geographically extensive collections of ant communities collected in Florida over the past several decades, supplemented by older records in museum collections. In addition to pursuing these research interests, the fellow is engaging in public outreach programs for grade-school age children as well as training future scientists through integrative biology internship programs while conducting research at Field Museum and the University of Illinois.This research has two main objectives in using available museum collections: (1) to investigate the long-term fates of invasive species and the corresponding dynamics of native communities after invasion to test competing hypotheses of community assembly i.e. neutral vs. niche assembly; and (2) to evaluate the importance of seven traits hypothesized to explain the ecological success of invasive species. Traits hypothesized to confer competitive success are continuous reproduction, polygyny, supercoloniality, omnivory, habitat generality, nest opportunism, and worker polymorphism. For these objectives, the fellow will investigate community dynamics at two phylogenetic scales: at a coarse phylogenetic scale, communities of all ants, and at a finer phylogenetic scale, communities of congeneric ants. In Florida, there are five common and/or diverse ant genera with native and non-native representative species. This will allow for a phylogenetically controlled statistical comparisons of ant community dynamics where members of these communities are more likely to overlap in life history and ecological traits due to shared ancestry. Once digitized, the collections data of this research will be publicly available through Antweb.org. As one of the largest and longest time series collections of ants from a single region, these data will be invaluable to community ecologist, invasive ecologists, pest management scientist, evolutionary biologist, biodiversity scientists, climate scientists, and conservationist.