Global biogeography of ant social parasites: Exploring patterns and mechanisms of an inverse latitudinal diversity gradient

Aim: One of the most consistent global biogeographic patterns is the latitudinal diversity gradient where species richness peaks within the equatorial tropics and decreases towards the poles. Here, we explore the global biogeography of socially parasitic ants, which comprises the most diverse group of social parasites in the Hymenoptera. We test the biogeographic hypothesis that ant social parasites are distributed along an inverse latitudinal diversity gradient by peaking in diversity outside of the equatorial tropics.
Location: Global
Taxon: Ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)
Methods: We assembled a comprehensive biogeographic dataset for all 371 taxonomically described socially parasitic ant species. We used phylogenetic and taxonomic studies to compare species richness with the number of species representing independent evolutionary origins of social parasitism across a latitudinal gradient. In addition, we compared ant social parasite diversity across biogeographic regions using rarefa..., We assembled a biogeographic dataset consisting of 6001 occurrence records for all 371 taxonomically described socially parasitic ant species. Geographic occurrence records were assembled from the Global Ant Biodiversity database (GABI) via antmaps.org (Janicki et al., 2016; Guénard et al., 2017), AntWeb (antweb.org), the Museum of Comparative Zoology database (mczbase.mcz.harvard.edu), specimen records in our personal collections, personal communication with colleagues, and the primary literature. For each social parasite species, we gathered occurrence records at each latitudinal and longitudinal degree for every country the parasite was reported from. In the case of countries with greater than 2.78x106 km2 land area, which includes Russia, Canada, China, the United States, Brazil, Australia, India, and Argentina, we used occurrence records at each latitudinal degree at the scale of first-level administration to achieve a more detailed biogeographic resolution in our dataset, which is..., The raw data and metadata used in this study are in an Excel Workbook format. To use the raw data one should export only the \"raw_data\" sheet of the Excel Workbook. Note: the raw data includes special characters such as (?) and spaces that were filtered out during analyses.Â