Maintaining diversity in an ant community: modeling, extending, and testing the dominance-discovery trade-off

Ant communities often consist of many species with apparently similar niches. We present a mathematical model of the dominance-discovery trade-off, the trade-off between the abilities to find and to control resources, showing that it can in principle facilitate the coexistence of large numbers of species. Baiting studies of dominance and discovery abilities in an ant community from the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona indicate that real communities fail to fit the assumptions of the simple model in several ways: (1) dominance depends on the size of the food resource; (2) for some ants, dominance depends on the presence or absence of specialist parasitoids; (3) pairwise dominance is not an all-or-nothing trait; and (4) a consistent negative relationship between pairwise differences in per capita discovery rates and dominance can be detected for only one bait type. Extended models incorporating these factors successfully predict the coexistence of five of the six most abundant members of this community but fail to accurately predict their relative abundances. Sensitivity analysis indicates that each complicating factor enhances the extent of coexistence.