Aim The existence of past connections between different regions through corridors has influenced the diversification of the biota in South America. Evidence of such connections in southern South America is scarce and poorly understood. As a model to analyse the existence of these corridors we study the evolutionary history of a widely distributed leaf‐cutting ant by inferring its origin, historical demographic and dispersal pr...

Despite being one of the most destructive invasive species of ants, only two natural enemies are known currently for Wasmannia auropunctata, commonly known as the electric ant or little fire ant. Because viruses can be effective biological control agents against many insect pests, including ants, a metagenomics/next-generation sequencing approach was used to facilitate discovery of virus sequences from the transcriptomes of W....

Ants, an ecologically successful and numerically dominant group of animals, play key ecological roles as soil engineers, predators, nutrient recyclers, and regulators of plant growth and reproduction in most terrestrial ecosystems. Further, ants are widely used as bioindicators of the ecological impact of land use. We gathered information of ant species in the Atlantic Forest of South America. The ATLANTIC ANTS data set, which...

Evolution may improve the invasiveness of populations, but it often remains unclear whether key adaptation events occur after introduction into the recipient habitat (i.e. post‐introduction adaptation scenario), or before introduction within the native range (i.e. prior‐adaptation scenario) or at a primary site of invasion (i.e. bridgehead scenario). We used a multidisciplinary approach to determine which of these three scenar...

One possible mechanism for interspecific transfer of Wolbachia is through the intimate contact between parasites and their hosts. We surveyed 10 species of fly parasitoids ( Pseudacteon spp.) and one inquiline social parasite, Solenopsis daguerrei , for the presence and sequence identity ( wsp gene) of Wolbachia . Two Wolbachia variants infecting S. daguerrei were identical to known variants infecting the two common ant host s...