ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2022
Warm and arid regions of the world are hotspots of superorganism complexity.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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15 citing papers in PubMed, 24 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Evolutionary and Ecological Consequences of Cooperation.The American naturalist · 2026Review
- Environmental conditions shape the global distribution of ant societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Environmental Variation Contributes to Head Phenotypes in Workers ofEcology and evolution · 2025Article
- Divergent evolution of colony-level metabolic scaling in ants.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Innovation in ant larval feeding facilitated queen-worker divergence and social complexity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Quantifying the configurational complexity of biological systems in multivariate 'complexity space'.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Microbiota-host metabolism reprogramming in colorectal cancer: from pathogenesis to precision therapies.Frontiers in oncology · 2025Review
- Randomness as a driver of inactivity in social groups.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Coevolution of larval signalling and worker response can trigger developmental caste determination in social insects.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Ecological diversification preceded geographical expansion during the evolutionary radiation ofiScience · 2024Article
- The diversity of social complexity in termites.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Social conditions facilitate water conservation in a solitary bee.Journal of insect science (Online) · 2024Article
- Ecological strategies of (pl)ants: Towards a world-wide worker economic spectrum for ants.Functional ecology · 2023Article
- DNA methylation and expression of the egfr gene are associated with worker size in monomorphic ants.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Warm and arid regions of the world are hotspots of superorganism complexity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 8 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Biologists have long been fascinated by the processes that give rise to phenotypic complexity of organisms, yet whether there exist geographical hotspots of phenotypic complexity remains poorly explored. Phenotypic complexity can be readily observed in ant colonies, which are superorganisms with morphologically differentiated queen and worker castes analogous to the germline and soma of multicellular organisms. Several ant species have evolved 'worker polymorphism', where workers in a single colony show quantifiable differences in size and head-to-body scaling. Here, we use 256 754 occurrence points from 8990 ant species to investigate the geography of worker polymorphism. We show that arid regions of the world are the hotspots of superorganism complexity. Tropical savannahs and deserts, which are typically species-poor relative to tropical or even temperate forests, harbour the highest densities of polymorphic ants. We discuss the possible adaptive advantages that worker polymorphism provides in arid environments. Our work may provide a window into the environmental conditions that promote the emergence of highly complex phenotypes.
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