Species diversity and community organization in desert seed-eating ants

Patterns of species diversity and community organization in desert seed-eating ants were studied in 10 habitats on a longitudinal gradient of increasing rainfall extending from southeastern California, through southern Arizona, and into southwestern New Mexico. Local communities of harvester ants include 2-7 common species, and at least 15 species from five genera of Myrmecines compose the total species pool in these deserts. Ant species diversity is highly correlated with mean annual precipitation, an index of productivity in arid regions. Communities are structured on the basis of competition for food, and interspecific differences in worker body sizes and colony foraging strategies represent important mechanisms of resource allocation. Seed size preferences, measured for native seeds and in food choice experiments with seeds of different size but uniform nutritional quality, are highly correlated with worker body sizes. Species of similar body size can coexist within local habitats if they differ in foraging strategy. Interspecific aggression and territorial defense and microhabitat partitioning all appear to be relatively unimportant in these ant communities. Patterns of species diversity and community organization in harvester ants are strikingly similar to those reported for communities of seed-eating rodents that occupy many of the same desert habitats. Separate regressions of within-habitat species diversity against the precipitation index of productivity for the two groups correspond closely in slope, intercept, and proportion of explained variation. Resource allocation on the basis of seed size characterizes local communities of both ants and rodents. Parallels between these two groups suggest that limits to specialization and overlap may be specified by parameters such as resource abundance and predictability that affect unrelated taxa similarly.