The economic strategies of superorganisms - data and code

Economic principles can be applied to biological life to understand how resource allocation strategies maximise evolutionary fitness. This approach has been developed in plants under the global leaf economic spectrum which describes investment and return of carbon and nutrients in leaves. Whether this applies to other taxa, indicating general principles, remains untested. We test whether a fast-slow economic spectrum can also explain variation in ecological strategies of a globally dominant group of superorganisms, the ants. Both plants and ants invest in numerous discrete modules dedicated to resource acquisition, namely leaves and ant workers. We measured traits from ant workers of 123 species across large-scale climatic and soil nutrient gradients. A fast return of resource investment was associated with large colonies of smaller, less robust, short-lived workers with low nitrogen:phosphorus ratios. Slow resource payback was associated with small colonies of densely built, energetically conservative and longer-lived workers with high nitrogen:phosphorus ratios. Species representing the entire fast-slow economic continuum co-occurred in communities at all environmental sites. Phylogenetic analyses revealed subfamily and genus level conservation of economic spectrum traits. This suggests that early lineages of ants diverged in their ecological strategies locking in fundamental fast-slow templates of investment and resource return. These results unite studies of plants and ants, suggesting common economic principles apply across the tree of life.