African army ants at the forefront of virome surveillance in deep tropical forests

In this study, we used a predator-enabled metagenomics strategy to sample the virome of a remote and difficult to access densely forested African tropical region. Specifically, we focused our study on the use of army ants of the genus Dorylus that are obligate collective foragers and group predators that attack and overwhelm a broad array of animal prey. Using 209 army ant samples collected from 29 colonies and the virion-associated nucleic acid-based metagenomics approach, we showed that a broad diversity of plant, bacterial, invertebrate and vertebrate viruses were accumulated by army ants: including 157 different viral genera in 56 viral families. This suggests that predators and scavengers such as army ants can be used to conveniently sample broad swathes of tropical forest viromes to gain insights into the impacts that natural or human-mediated environmental changes to inaccessible ecosystems have on the viral population compositions and population structures of those ecosystems.