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

这是NSF生物学博士后研究奖学金，项目是使用生物收藏进行研究。这位名叫Doug Booher的研究员正在进行研究，并接受以创新方式利用生物收藏的培训，并由两家主办机构的两名赞助科学家提供指导：科里·莫罗(菲尔德自然历史博物馆)和安德鲁·苏亚雷斯(伊利诺伊大学)。这位研究员的研究旨在描述和解释随着非本地物种的到来和传播，本地物种的丰度、分布和多样性的变化。人类造成的非本地动植物运输正以前所未有的速度在全球范围内转移物种。这些引入的物种是导致物种灭绝的第二大原因。因此，了解入侵物种在不同时间尺度上对生态群落的影响是生态学研究中的一个主要问题。在佛罗里达州，239种蚂蚁中约有25%是非本地蚂蚁，其中约一半是在过去35年中引入的。这位研究员正在评估入侵蚂蚁物种的影响，使用了过去几十年在佛罗里达州收集的非常大的、地理上广泛的蚂蚁群落收藏品，并辅之以博物馆收藏品中更古老的记录。除了追求这些研究兴趣外，该研究员还在菲尔德博物馆和伊利诺伊斯大学进行研究，参与针对小学适龄儿童的公共推广计划，以及通过综合生物学实习计划培训未来的科学家。这项研究在利用现有博物馆藏品方面有两个主要目标：(1)调查入侵物种的长期命运和入侵后本地社区的相应动态，以检验相互竞争的群落聚集假说，即中性聚集和生态位聚集；(2)评估假设的七个特征的重要性，以解释入侵物种的生态成功。假设赋予竞争成功的特征是连续繁殖、一夫多妻制、超殖民性、杂食性、栖息地共性、巢机会主义和工蚁多态。为了达到这些目标，该研究员将在两个系统发育尺度上研究群落动态：在粗略的系统发育尺度上研究所有蚂蚁的群落，以及在较细的系统发育尺度上研究同类蚂蚁的群落。在佛罗里达州，有五个常见的和/或不同的蚂蚁属，有本地和非本地的代表性物种。这将允许对蚂蚁群落动态进行系统发育控制的统计比较，其中由于共同的祖先，这些群落的成员更有可能在生活史和生态特征上重叠。一旦数字化，这项研究的收集数据将通过Antweb.org公开提供。作为单个地区最大和最长的蚂蚁时间序列集合之一，这些数据对社区生态学家、入侵生态学家、害虫管理学家、进化生物学家、生物多样性科学家、气候科学家和自然资源保护者来说将是无价的。

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.