Laboratory of Molecular Ecology and Biodiversity

Butterflies crossing oceans, moths navigating by the stars: unravelling the mysteries of insect migrations Trillions of insects embark, largely unnoticed, on epic journeys every year across mountain ranges, deserts and seas, and it is only now, as their numbers suffer huge declines, that scientists are tracking their movements

While some people were still enjoying the winter holidays, our lab members Jakub Dubravec, Jakub Sidlik, and Damian Villasenor were already hard at work. Since early January, they’ve been based at the Natural History Museum Berlin for a month-long visit with colleagues from the Center for Integrative Biodiversity Discovery, learning how to use the biodiversity scanner and sequencing ants.

Thanks to this great collaboration, they sequenced 4,000+ ants from the South Pacific and produced new data for under-studied regions such as Bougainville, New Britain, and Guadalcanal.

Some time ago, we published a study on Tapinoma ants, presenting a preliminary phylogeny of the genus and exploring the population history of the ghost ant Tapinoma melanocephalum, one of the most widely distributed ant species. It was a great collaboration with our colleagues in Utah, led by our PhD candidate Oscar Pérez.

A bit of background: A few years ago, while checking genetic data from Tapinoma ants we’d collected across New Guinea and the Indo-Pacific, we noticed a quiet problem: alongside the globally common ghost ant Tapinoma melanocephalum, there seemed to be a second, closely related species. Not surprising—these ants are tiny, with few obvious characters, and collections worldwide have routinely lumped “small pale Tapinoma” under one convenient name. DNA was less cooperative.
Our genomic results strongly supported a distinct sister species. Then Dr. B. Seifert and colleagues described Tapinoma pithecorum, which initially fit our findings, so we updated the manuscript and sent it to review. During the review process (and after exchanging material), it turned out the type specimen of T. pithecorum was an aberrant, unusually coloured individual of an already described species. So the actual new species had to be described again.
In other words, our review process lasted long enough for the taxonomy to change twice.
The species is now Tapinoma jandai—with the earliest known specimens collected in 2004 near Baitabag village, northeastern Papua New Guinea.

Takeaway: if you wait too long to publish, even an obscure little tropical ant can get published by someone else first. But if you wait even longer, the science may catch up, the taxonomy may get corrected… and the result might actually end up better.

A phylogenomic overview of the ant genus Tapinoma Foerster, 1850 (Formicidae: Dolichoderinae), with the phylogeographic history of the ghost ant Tapinoma melanocephalum Abstract. The ant genus Tapinoma Foerster, 1850 is a moderately diverse group (81 valid species) that occurs worldwide. It includes the tramp species T. me

If you’re interested in ants, this recent article is a great, up-to-date introduction to ant systematics—plus it offers helpful ideas on what we should focus on next.

Ant systematics: past, present, and future Abstract. The classification of ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) has progressed in waves since the first 17 species were described by Linnaeus in the 1758 ed

10,000 Arthropods in a Hectare: What We Found Crawling, Flying, and Hiding in Panama’s Rainforest Post provided by Daniel Souto-Vilarós. I’m a molecular ecologist who currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Utah, with a long-standing obsession with biodiversity. While …

Our latest study on diversity of insects along elevational gradient in north Mexico

Unravelling high insect diversity and community turnover along a tropical-temperate elevation gradient: A metabarcoding approach The transition zone between the Nearctic and Neotropical biogeographic regions is one of the most species-rich areas of North America, known as the Mexican Transition Zone. We sampled mobile insects along a 2000 m elevational gradient for 13 months using flight interception traps (Malaise) to evalua...

Global phylogenetic and functional structure of rodent assemblages https://vist.ly/3n42hsw

Exploring the global patterns of phylogenetic and functional structure of assemblages is key to describe the distribution of biodiversity on Earth and to predict how communities and ecosystem functioning may be affected by anthropogenic pressures. Rodent communities have been studied in this regard in the past, but previous work largely focused on desert ecosystems. Here, we leveraged a large database of rodent range maps, functional traits, and phylogenetic trees to compute several metrics of functional and phylogenetic structure across > 10 000 rodent assemblages spanning all terrestrial biomes. We found that the vast majority of assemblages did not significantly differ from random association among species. Importantly, we show that the current patterns we observed can locally differ from past community structure, revealing the role humans have played in altering large-scale biodiversity patterns. We also showed a strong scale-dependence of our metrics and revealed a weak correlation between phylogenetic and functional structure, providing an additional line of evidence that they do not reflect the same processes of community assembly.

Species that dominate spatial turnover can be of (almost) any abundance https://vist.ly/3myeuuy

An ongoing quest in ecology is understanding how species commonness influences compositional change. While each species' contribution to beta diversity (SCBD) depends both on its abundance and how widespread it is (e.g. occupancy) a general expectation for these influences is lacking. Using published data for 9924 species across 177 metacommunities, we modelled relative SCBD as a function of abundance and occupancy using both correlative and mechanistic regression models (the latter derived from population demographic theory). Although the correlative model provided a superior fit to the data, both results suggest it is species with infrequent combinations of abundance and occupancy (high abundance and mid-high occupancy) that make the dominant contribution to beta diversity. The nature of their interaction is most apparent when depicted in abundance–occupancy sample space, which shows the probability of making a dominant contribution to beta diversity is a concave-up function of abundance. Species found in an intermediate number of sites (0.56) required the smallest share of total abundance (0.05) to make a top-decile contribution. Simulations varying evenness of abundance and conspecific spatial patterns support the main findings and show that it is variations in the strength of aggregation that predominantly result in the observed relationship between the abundance and occupancy of a species and its contribution to beta diversity. The abundance–occupancy sample space illustrates how empirical abundance-SCBD relationships can be linear or unimodal and provides a general framework to understand global change processes. To preserve compositional turnover, species of infrequent abundance and occupancy should be prioritized.

From octopuses to snails, the complicated molluscan family tree has now been mapped in unprecedented detail, researchers report in Science.

This includes sequences for 13 new complete genomes from across the phylum. https://scim.ag/41Lh9DG

Hormigas invasoras en México, una anemasa silenciosa.

www.enesmorelia.unam.mx

🌲 Forests Webinar | Insect Biodiversity in a Changing World

📣 Join us at our free webinar to explore the challenges and opportunities in insect biodiversity!

📅 Date: 10 March 2025
👉 Register here: https://bit.ly/4kDt0LJ
🔗 Read More: https://bit.ly/4kDtfq7