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. 2022 Mar 7;45(1):e20210120.
doi: 10.1590/1678-4685-GMB-2021-0120. eCollection 2022.

Fire ants: What do rural and urban areas show us about occurrence, diversity, and ancestral state reconstruction?

Manuela de O Ramalho  1 , Leonardo Menino  2 , Rodrigo F Souza  2 , Débora Y Kayano  2 , Juliana M C Alves  2 , Ricardo Harakava  3 , Victor H Nagatani  2 , Otávio G M Silva  4 , Odair C Bueno  5 , Maria S C Morini  2
Affiliations

Fire ants: What do rural and urban areas show us about occurrence, diversity, and ancestral state reconstruction?

Manuela de O Ramalho et al. Genet Mol Biol. .

Abstract

In South America, Solenopsis saevissima and S. invicta are the most common fire ants. Nests are founded in areas under anthropic interference like urban or rural areas, but S. invicta is found preferentially in those with the greatest anthropic interference. However, we do not know the rates at which they exist in anthropized areas next to high density of native vegetation. Areas with 60 to 90% of native Atlantic Forest were selected to verify the occurrence of both species in rural and urban areas. We investigated the molecular diversity and applied the reconstruction of the ancestral state analysis for each species. A total of 186 nests were analyzed and we found that the two species had the same proportion in the urban area. However, S. saevissima had a higher rate of prevalence in the rural area, in addition to having a greater number of haplotypes and ancestry associated with this type of habitat for the region. S. invicta had the same number of haplotypes in both rural and urban regions, and less haplotypic diversity. We conclude that S. saevissima is a species typically associated with rural areas and S. invicta, although present, is not dominant in urban areas.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of Interest: The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1 -
Figure 1 -. Geographic location of the counties and collection sites of Solenopsis nests. Circle: S. saevissima (n= 103); triangle: S. invicta nests (n= 83).
Figure 2 -
Figure 2 -. Network of haplotypes of Solenopsis saevissima and Solenopsis invicta. The habitat of the sample was highlighted with the colors green and orange corresponding to the rural and urban habitats, respectively. Dotted circles indicate the delimitation of each species. The red point was added by the program as hypothetical haplotype.
Figure 3 -
Figure 3 -. Comparison of the number of nests in urban (A) and rural (B) populations of Solenopsis saevissima and Solenopsis invicta. The lines inside each bar represent the median. Different letters represent statistically significant differences (Mann-Whitney test, p <0.05).
Figure 4 -
Figure 4 -. Summary of all stochastic character maps for ancestral state reconstruction of the habitat of Solenopsis saevissima and Solenopsis invicta for the studied region. Red arrows highlight the probability of the state of the ancestor of each species. Model = all rates different (ARD).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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