Category: News

Environmental conditions shape the global distribution of ant societies.

Sociality has evolved several times and is a key strategy for overcoming environmental challenges and promoting ecological success. Yet, it remains unclear how environmental conditions shape global variation in social traits of animals. With their diverse societies and global distribution, ants are ideal to test whether environmental conditions influence the distribution of animal social traits worldwide. Here, we used trait data for a total of 3,299 ant species to explore how three key social traits (reproductive structure, colony size, and worker polymorphism) vary with environmental conditions globally. We show that trait compositions are strongly structured by biomes, indicating that habitat types, as well as environmental factors like temperature and seasonality, influence sociality. Our findings highlight the crucial role of the environment in shaping the global distribution of sociality in ants, contributing to a better understanding of how complex animal societies evolved.

Read the full paper here, and the UNIL press release (in French) here.

Explaining how we conduct research on variations in ant societies, the long construction of a database on social traits in ants, and how surprised we were by the strong associations between types of ant societies and the environment. Listen to the podcast here (in French).

Talking about our new paper in PNAS on how ant societies are shaped by the environment. Listen to him here (in French).

We will organize a summer school on ‘Ant Ecology in an Era of Global Change’ in beautiful Arolla (Switzerland), 23-28 August 2026.

The dates have been chosen, so that international participants can join directly after the IUSSI conference in Freiburg (it’s only a couple of hours by train).

More info: https://wp.unil.ch/bertelsmeiergroup/antecol/

Olivia Bates has published a new review paper on studies predicting range changes of insects in Diversity and Distributions.

While introduced species were predicted to increase more frequently in range than native species, both increases and decreases were predicted in both groups, highlighting species-specific changes. However, large differences in study methodology hinder our ability to compare predicted responses across species. Predictions of future ranges may be driven by factors such as species’ physiology and geographic distribution. However, there is a large variety in predicted changes between insect species, and it is unknown to what extent these differences among species are due to the specific set of methodologies and data used to model the species’ distribution, given that individual studies vary greatly in regard to the methodologies and data used to make predictions.We therefore discuss these differences and how they may influence range predictions.

Link to paper here.