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Tradeoffs, competition, and coexistence in eastern deciduous forest ant communities

  • Community ecology - Original research
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Abstract

Ecologists have long sought to explain the coexistence of multiple potentially competing species in local assemblages. This is especially challenging in species-rich assemblages in which interspecific competition is intense, as it often is in ant assemblages. As a result, a suite of mechanisms has been proposed to explain coexistence among potentially competing ant species: the dominance–discovery tradeoff, the dominance–thermal tolerance tradeoff, spatial segregation, temperature-based niche partitioning, and temporal niche partitioning. Through a series of observations and experiments, we examined a deciduous forest ant assemblage in eastern North America for the signature of each of these coexistence mechanisms. We failed to detect evidence for any of the commonly suggested mechanisms of coexistence, with one notable exception: ant species appear to temporally partition foraging times such that behaviourally dominant species foraged more intensely at night, while foraging by subdominant species peaked during the day. Our work, though focused on a single assemblage, indicates that many of the commonly cited mechanisms of coexistence may not be general to all ant assemblages. However, temporal segregation may play a role in promoting coexistence among ant species in at least some ecosystems, as it does in many other organisms.

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Acknowledgments

We thank C. Hirsch for help in the field. Discussions with N.J. Gotelli and A.E. Ellison, and comments by H. Gibb, S.E. Kuebbing, J.P. Lessard, and two anonymous reviewers helped to improve this manuscript. D. Simberloff helped with the creating the confidence intervals for measures of dominance. R.R. Dunn and N.J. Sanders were supported by DOE-PER DE-FG02-08ER64510. Additionally, K.L. Stuble was supported by the DOE GREF and EPA STAR programs, and by the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee. G.L. McCormick was supported by a DOE SURE.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, 569 Dabney Hall, Knoxville, TN, USA

    Katharine L. Stuble, Mariano A. Rodriguez-Cabal, Ivan Jurić & Nathan J. Sanders

  2. Department of Biology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Gail L. McCormick

  3. Department of Biology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Robert R. Dunn

  4. Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, 2100, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Nathan J. Sanders

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  1. Katharine L. Stuble
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  2. Mariano A. Rodriguez-Cabal
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  3. Gail L. McCormick
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  4. Ivan Jurić
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  5. Robert R. Dunn
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  6. Nathan J. Sanders
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Correspondence to Katharine L. Stuble.

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Communicated by Phil Lester.

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Stuble, K.L., Rodriguez-Cabal, M.A., McCormick, G.L. et al. Tradeoffs, competition, and coexistence in eastern deciduous forest ant communities. Oecologia 171, 981–992 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-012-2459-9

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