Timing is everything: Evolution of ponerine ants highlights how dispersal history shapes modern biodiversity

A cornerstone of biogeography since its early developments has been to disentangle the drivers of the distribution of biodiversity patterns worldwide. Here we produce a complete species-level phylogeny of the subfamily of ponerine ants (Formicidae: Ponerinae) based on new phylogenomic sequencing and taxonomic grafting. We combine results with a large-scale geographic database to explore the interplay of the main mechanisms shaping global ponerine biodiversity patterns. We show that extant ponerine ants originated in Gondwana, spread primarily eastward across tropical bioregions, and then more recently expanded toward temperate areas. Differences in the timing of colonization events were identified as the prominent key drivers of present-day biodiversity patterns. Meanwhile, differences in diversification rates and asymmetrical dispersal histories acted instead as buffers of the heterogeneity in biodiversity by fueling accumulation of lineages in the least diverse bioregions. This suggests that tropical niche conservatism played a major role in shaping the biogeographic and evolutionary history of Ponerinae. It also highlights the importance of considering the timing of past biogeographic and evolutionary events, in complement to the scrutiny of differences in current diversification rates, to gain a deeper understanding of Earth's biodiversity patterns.