Evolutionary history of ponerine ants highlights how the timing of dispersal events shapes modern biodiversity

Authors: DORE, MAEL - Museum Of Naturkunde; BOROWIEC, MAREK - Colorado State University; Branstetter, Michael; CAMACHO, GABRIELA - University Of São Paulo; FISHER, BRIAN - California Academy Of Sciences; LONGINO, JOHN - University Of Utah; WARD, PHILIP - University Of California, Davis; BLAIMER, BONNIE - Museum Of Naturkunde

Submitted to: Nature Communications
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 8/27/2025
Publication Date: 9/16/2025
Citation: Dore, M., Borowiec, M., Branstetter, M.G., Camacho, G.P., Fisher, B.L., Longino, J.T., Ward, P.S., Blaimer, B. 2025. Evolutionary history of ponerine ants highlights how the timing of dispersal events shapes modern biodiversity. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-63709-3.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-63709-3

Interpretive Summary: Biodiversity is not evenly spread across the plant, with some areas having more species than others. Various ideas have been proposed to explain these differences, but large-scale datasets that combine knowledge of diversity, distribution, and evolutionary history are needed to tease apart different possible explanations. An international group of researchers addressed this issue by compiling a large genome-scale molecular dataset combined with distribution information for over 700+ ant species in the subfamily Ponerinae. By analyzing the evolutionary history of the group it was possible to reconstruct how the ant group originated, spread across the globe, and diversified through time. The results indicate that one of the most important factors in understanding diversity is the amount of time that a group has been present in a region, with other factors like differences in species diversification rates, and differences in dispersal between regions, being less important. This study provides a major improvement in our understanding of how biodiversity forms while also improving knowledge of the systematics of an important group of ants.

Technical Abstract: A cornerstone of biogeography since its early developments has been to disentangle the drivers of the distribution of biodiversity patterns worldwide. Here we produce a complete species-level phylogeny of the subfamily of ponerine ants (Formicidae: Ponerinae) based on new phylogenomic sequencing and taxonomic grafting. We combine results with a large-scale geographic database to explore the interplay of the main mechanisms shaping global ponerine biodiversity patterns. We show that extant ponerine ants originated in Gondwana, spread primarily eastward across tropical bioregions, and then more recently expanded toward temperate areas. Differences in the timing of colonization events were identified as the prominent key drivers of present-day biodiversity patterns. Meanwhile, differences in diversification rates and asymmetrical dispersal histories acted instead as buffers of the heterogeneity in biodiversity by fueling accumulation of lineages in the least diverse bioregions. This suggests that tropical niche conservatism played a major role in shaping the biogeographic and evolutionary history of Ponerinae. It also highlights the importance of considering the timing of past biogeographic and evolutionary events, in complement to the scrutiny of differences in current diversification rates, to gain a deeper understanding of Earth’s biodiversity patterns.