Spatial Grain and the Causes of Regional Diversity Gradients in Ants

Gradients of species richness (S; the number of species of a given taxon in a given area and time) are ubiquitous. A key goal in ecology is to understand whether and how the many processes that generate these gradients act at different spatial scales. Here we evaluate six hypotheses for diversity gradients with 49 New World ant communities, from tundra to rain forest. We contrast their performance at three spatial grains from S(plot), the average number of ant species nesting in a m2 plot, through Fisher's alpha, an index that treats our 30 1-m2 plots as subsamples of a locality's diversity. At the smallest grain, S(plot), was tightly correlated (r2 = 0.99) with colony abundance in a fashion indistinguishable from the packing of randomly selected individuals into a fixed space. As spatial grain increased, the coaction of two factors linked to high net rates of diversification--warm temperatures and large areas of uniform climate--accounted for 75% of the variation in Fisher's alpha. However, the mechanisms underlying these correlations (i.e., precisely how temperature and area shape the balance of speciation to extinction) remain elusive.