Different aspects of dominance are not equivalent when testing for trade-offs in ant communities

Differences in dominance are frequently invoked to explain the outcomes of competition. Yet, what it means to be dominant, and which traits underlie dominance, are poorly understood. Here, we sought to determine the relationships between multiple aspects of dominance, the potential for trade-offs with discovery ability, and the traits associated with these patterns within a high elevation community of five ant taxa. We examined several common dominance metrics – behavioral dominance (winning aggressive encounters at both the individual and colony levels), numerical dominance (abundance and activity in baits and pitfall traps), and ecological dominance (high relative frequency in baits) – and found that individual- and colony-level behavioral dominance were positively correlated, as were ecological and numerical dominance. However, colony-level behavioral and numerical dominance were negatively correlated, and no other dominance metrics were associated. There was a dominance-discovery trade-off, as increased behavioral (but not numerical or ecological) dominance was associated with slower resource discovery. This trade-off was likely driven by behaviorally dominant ants having larger body sizes and recruiting a greater biomass of workers to baits. In contrast, fast discoverers were more abundant in the environment (i.e., numerically dominant). Complementing our empirical study, a meta-analysis of 54 responses from 21 studies showed that the association between dominance and discovery ability depended on dominance metric. Whereas discovery ability was positively correlated with numerical dominance, its relationships with behavioral and ecological dominance were highly variable and not significantly different from zero. Overall, our empirical findings, in combination with the synthesis of past studies, demonstrate that different aspects of ant dominance are not equivalent. Yet, regardless of dominance type, there is little evidence that dominance-discovery trade-offs occur in most ant communities.