Dominance and resource temporal partitioning in pasture ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

We carried out two sampling programs in pastures to examine the existence of asymmetric competition in pasture ants, to identify the potentially dominant species and to assess how ants do coexist. The first sampling was carried out with two different types of pitfall traps, with and without access to a bait. The first trap series collected significantly fewer species than the second, and we attributed this difference to a dominance of some ant species in this community. Since the collections may be biased by temporal partitioning, we carried out a second sampling to verify the species composition of each period, in which ants were removed every eight hours. We used this data to carry out null model analyses, which revealed the existence of a random pattern of species co-occurrence. We found evidence of temporal partitioning, suggesting that abiotic factors may be relatively more important than competition in the assembly of pasture ant communities.