Differences in Forage-Acquisition and Fungal Enzyme Activity Contribute to Niche Segregation in Panamanian Leaf-Cutting Ants
Figure 2
Differences in fungus garden enzyme activity.
Differences in fungus garden enzyme activity between species grouped as in Figure 1 with solid lines for Atta and dotted lines for Acromyrmex, and with dark green, yellow and orange indicating the same habitat categories: (A) Heatmap showing differences between species and genera in fungus garden activity of enzyme classes, expressed as mean area in cm2±SE of colored halos on AZCL plates across all assays for enzymes belonging to the amylases (1), cellulases (2), hemicellulases (4), pectinases (3) and proteinases (2). Darker colors in the heatmap indicate higher mean activities, and the top-dendrogram illustrates similarities between species across all means for the five groups of enzymes, estimated by “pvclust” with 1000000 bootstraps. (B) Dendrogram based on the inverse Simpson Diversity Index of proportional enzyme activity showing that Acromyrmex fungus gardens have more even secretions across enzyme categories (D = 4.55±0.05 SE) than Atta (D = 4.18±0.07 SE, F1,52 = 15.006, p<0.0001). Numbers above the branch nodes represent Approximately Unbiased p-values (AU, red) and Bootstrap Probability values (BP, green).