Abstract
Existing biological techniques, when applied in novel ways or to novel systems, can be used to overcome long-standing obstacles. Limitations resulting from traditional methods of forage material identification make resource partitioning impractical to study in non-leafcutting fungus gardening ants. This thesis explores the use of dietary DNA (dDNA) metabarcoding as a method of forage material identification in ant fungus gardens. We hypothesize that dDNA analysis will be sufficient to identify forage material in the gardens of co-occurring species Trachymyrmex septentrionalis and Mycetomoellerius turrifex. Furthermore, we hypothesize that T. septentrionalis and M. turrifex will forage on significantly different substrate material, and that ant colonies at different locations will forage on significantly different substrate material. To test these hypotheses, we collected T. septentrionalis and M. turrifex fungus gardens and sequenced their contents using primers designed for use with dDNA analyses. Our results demonstrate that fungus garden dDNA analysis can be successfully used to identify the foraged substrate of fungus gardening ants. While we did not find a significant difference between T. septentrionalis and M. turrifex foraged substrate material, ant colonies at different locations did forage significantly different substrate material.
Date of publication
2024
Document Type
Thesis
Language
english
Persistent identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/10950/4756
Committee members
Jon Seal, Matthew Greenwold, Joshua Banta
Recommended Citation
Richards-Perhatch, Matthew V, "FORAGE PREFERENCE IN TWO GEOGRAPHICALLY CO-OCCURRING FUNGUS GARDENING ANTS (FORMICIDAE): A NOVEL DIETARY DNA APPROACH" (2024). Biology Theses. Paper 82.
http://hdl.handle.net/10950/4756