How Ants Took Over the World | A Bioscience Publishing Platform

How Ants Took Over the World

Published:28 Apr.2023 Source:Field Museum

“When you look around the world today, you can see ants on nearly every continent occupying all these different habitats, and even different dimensions of those habitats -- some ants live underground, some live in the canopies of trees. We’re trying to understand how they were able to diversify from a single common ancestor to occupy all these different spaces,” says Matthew Nelsen, a research scientist at the Field Museum in Chicago. Scientists already knew that ants and flowering plants, or angiosperms, both originated around 140 million years ago and subsequently became more prevalent and spread to new habitats.

Nelsen and his colleagues wanted to find evidence that the two groups’ evolutionary paths were linked. To find that link, Nelsen and his colleagues compared the climates that 1,400 modern ant species inhabit, including data on temperature and precipitation. They coupled this information with a time-scaled reconstruction of the ant family tree, based on genetic information and ant fossils preserved in amber. Many ant behaviors, like where they build their nests and what habitats they live in, appear to be deeply ingrained in their species’ lineages, to the point that scientists are able to make pretty good guesses about prehistoric ants’ lives based on their modern relatives. These data, when paired with similar information about plants, helped bring the early ants' world into focus.