Ant Analysis: The Story Behind the Lasius Work by Three Alumni of the Phil Ward Lab – Entomology & Nematology Information

Summary of the ant analysis paper by Brendon Boudinot, Matthew Prebus and Marek Borowiec.

Myrmecologists Brendon Boudinot, Marek Borowiec and Matthew Prebus, all alumni of the Phil Ward laboratory, UC Davis Division of Entomology and Nematology, are drawing rave evaluations for his or her collaborative analysis,   “Phylogeny, Evolution, and Classification of the Ant Genus Lasius, the Tribe Lasiini and the Subfamily Formicinae (Hymenoptera: Formicidae),” printed in within the journal Systemic Entomology.

The ant world on Twitter is crawling with congratulatory feedback and the way “superior” the work is.  Wrote one:  “Congratulations! Lasius is a well-recognized genus in Japan, so I’ll let the Japanese entomologists find out about it.”

The story behind the story? All of it started within the Ward lab. “The Three Ant Males” at the moment are scattered from Idaho to Arizona to Germany.

• Borowiec, who obtained his doctorate at UC Davis in 2016, is an assistant professor on the College of Idaho.
• Prebus, who obtained his doctorate at UC Davis in 2018, is a postdoctoral scholar at Arizona State College. 
• Boudinot, who obtained his doctorate at UC Davis in 2020, is in Jena, Germany on a two-year Alexander von Humboldt Analysis Fellowship to analysis evolutionary and comparative anatomy.

“Inside the Formicidae, the upper classification of almost all subfamilies has been not too long ago revised given the findings of molecular phylogenetics,” the co-authors wrote of their summary. “Right here, we combine morphology and molecular information to holistically deal with the evolution, classification, and identification of the ant genus Lasius, its tribe Lasiini, and their subfamily Formicinae. We discover that the crown Lasiini originated across the finish of the Cretaceous on the Eurasian continent and is divisible into 4 morphologically distinct clades: Cladomyrma, the Lasius genus group, the Prenolepis genus group, and a beforehand undetected lineage we identify Metalasius gen.nov., with one extant species M. myrmidon comb. nov. and one fossil species, †M. pumilus comb. nov. ”  (See extra.)

Brendon Boudinot, co-author

Boudinot says “this work was eight years within the making—trials and tribulations had been the order of the last decade.” The examine started with a problem. “Phil instructed us of a inhabitants of extremely uncommon species of Lasius from Gates Canyon Canyon close to Vacaville, L. atopus, and puzzled if we might have the ability to discover a colony. The three of us drove to Gates Canyon on March 22, 2014 and spent a number of hours flipping rocks and digging on this steep-sided and poison-oak-filled ravine till we discovered one! We proceeded to hack our means by the poison oak roots to gather as many specimens as potential.”

Matthew Prebus, co-author

Mentioned Boudinot: “With these unusual, elongate Lasius in hand and underneath the microscope, we realized that the inhabitants possible represents a brand new and intently associated species, however we held off on describing the species, as a substitute selecting to concentrate on the speculation that L. atopus belonged to the Chthonolasius subgenus, as postulated in 1958 by Artwork Cole. Underneath Marek’s management, we proceeded to sequence this inhabitants of L. atopus, together with eleven different rigorously chosen species from the genus for phylogenetic evaluation, and we introduced our outcomes on the 2014 Entomological Society of America assembly in Portland Oregon. Particularly, we discovered that L. atopus doesn’t belong in Chthonolasius, and on prime of that the nominotypical subgenus, Lasius (Lasius) was polyphyletic, that’s, an unnatural grouping that excludes some daughter lineages whereas additionally together with distantly associated species.”

Marek Borowiec, co-author

Along with presenting their outcomes on the ESA assembly, they submitted their examine as a manuscript to Systematic Entomology, “which is once we skilled an acute episode of tribulation as our work was rejected for being too preliminary, regardless of our various taxon sampling and incisive molecular dataset,” Boudinot recalled. “Undaunted, we expanded our taxon sampling, this time sequencing a number of species collected by different colleagues, together with Marek’s father. To our great shock, we found that certainly one of these newly sequenced taxa, the not too long ago described Grecian species Lasius myrmidon was, actually, not a Lasius in any respect! Quite, this species seems to be an historic and remoted relictual lineage, sister to the mightily various Prenolepis genus group, which itself is the closest relative of the Lasius genus group. After many begins and stops, the venture lay dormant as Marek and Matt accomplished their dissertations, and I centered on getting mine into form.’

Wanting again, Prebus and Borowiec stated that they had been each enthusiastic about Lasius atopus “as a result of its unusual morphology and lack of phylogenetic information regardless of the quantity of consideration paid to the genus, and deliberate a gathering journey to the sort locality in Mendocino County in 2013.”

The gathering journey to Mendocino proved unsuccessful. “However due to Phil’s in depth collections. we knew of a inhabitants of a intently associated species in Gates Canyon close to town of Vacaville,” Prebus stated. This time the trio collected specimens from a number of colonies at Gates Canyon, which is positioned off Pleasants Valley Highway.

“For all of us, this was a collaborative aspect venture, so after the examine was introduced, submitted, and rejected, it took the back-burner whereas folks completed their dissertations, obtained jobs, obtained married, had children, and so forth,” Prebus recalled. “Talking personally, the pandemic put fairly a couple of of my postdoc tasks on maintain after the Arizona State College campus closed, however the small upside amongst the inundation of downsides was that I used to be in a position to concentrate on getting some long-haul tasks into form for publication, together with the Lasius examine. This concerned an enormous quantity of reanalysis of information that we had already collected, however fortunately did not require producing any new information.”

“In my view, one of many actually cool features of this examine is the strategy of evaluating the position of fossil taxa within the phylogeny of the subfamily Formicinae,” Prebus shared. “As a result of DNA information aren’t out there for fossil taxa, the project of fossils to ranks larger than species depends on the interpretation of their morphology, and traditionally that interpretation has relied closely on knowledgeable opinion–and all the biases that stated specialists maintain. By gathering morphological information from all extant and fossil taxa in our dataset, we had been in a position to unite the DNA data–from extant taxa–and the morphological data–from extant and fossil species–and formalize fossil placement, and consider the uncertainty of these placements, in model-based analyses. I feel that this examine joins a rising development in systematics generally, wherein we’re more and more transferring away from knowledgeable opinion towards approaches which might be testable and repeatable.”  

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