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Updated: Feb 11, 2026

Collection and Long-Term Maintenance of Leaf-Cutting Ants Atta in Laboratory Conditions
Published on: August 30, 2022
Macroecology and macroevolution of the latitudinal diversity gradient in ants
Evan P Economo1, Nitish Narula2, Nicholas R Friedman2
1Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, Onna, Okinawa, 904-0495, Japan. evaneconomo@gmail.com.
Abstract:
The latitudinal diversity gradient-the tendency for more species to occur toward the equator-is the dominant pattern of life on Earth, yet the mechanisms responsible for it remain largely unexplained. Recently, the analysis of global data has led to advances in understanding, but these advances have been mostly limited to vertebrates and trees and have not provided consensus answers. Here we synthesize large-scale geographic, phylogenetic, and fossil data for an exemplar invertebrate group-ants-and investigate whether the latitudinal diversity gradient arose due to higher rates of net diversification in the tropics, or due to a longer time period to accumulate diversity due to Earth's climatic history. We find that latitudinal affinity is highly conserved, temperate clades are young and clustered within tropical clades, and diversification rate shows no systematic variation with latitude. These results indicate that diversification time-and not rate-is the main driver of the diversity gradient in ants.
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