Figure 1.
Map of established ant colonies and target seedlings.
Location and size of plants hosting colonies of Azteca sp., Crematogaster laevis, and Pheidole minutula and the location of experimentally planted seedlings (“trap plants”) of Maieta guianensis and Tococa bullifera.
Figure 2.
Focal community of ant-plant mutualists.
Graphical depiction of the Amazonian plant-ant community used to quantify dispersal capability of ant queens. Values by arrows are the percentage of host-plants colonized by each species of ant in our 9-ha study site.
Figure 3.
Distance from colonized seedlings to the nearest reproductive ant colony.
Histograms of the pairwise distances from each colonized trap plant to the nearest reproductive colony of the ant species that colonized it. A) Pheidole minutula: mean pairwise distance = 10.91 m±5.26 SD, B) Crematogaster laevis: mean pairwise distance = 37.49 m±25.92 SD, C) Azteca sp.: mean pairwise distance = 12.30 m±6.53 SD.
Figure 4.
Pairwise distances from established colonies to trap plants.
Histograms of the distance from trap plants to colonies for each of the three focal ant species. The X axis shows the percentage of all colony-trap pairwise comparisons. A) Pheidole minutula: mean colony-trap distance = 137.59 m±53.69 SD, B) Crematogaster laevis: mean colony-trap distance = 130.88 m±60.60 SD, C) Azteca sp.: mean colony-trap distance = 116.09 m±59.84 SD.
Figure 5.
Dispersal kernels for three species of Amazonian plant-ants.
Dispersal kernels (i.e., probability density functions describing the spatial redistribution of queens around reproductive colonies) for ant queens obligately nesting in Tococa bullifera or Maieta guianensis. These kernels are scaled for a colony housed in a plant of the median size observed in our 9-ha study plot.
Table 1.
Result of Steel's Test comparing the median distance of colonized trap plants to the nearest reproductive colony for all pairwise comparisons of ant species.
Table 2.
Nested Analysis of Variance comparing the average distance of trap plants to colonies of the three ant species (Crematogaster laevis, Azteca sp., Pheidole minutula) mapped in our 9 ha study site.
Table 3.
Maximum-likelihood parameter estimates (MLE) and 95% support intervals (SI) for inverse models estimating the dispersal kernels of three mutualist ant species nesting in two species of Amazonian ant-plants.
Table 4.
Results of linear regressions testing for a relationship between the number of domatia a plant has and the number of queens counted in that a plant.