We use phylogenomic markers, ultraconserved elements (UCEs), to reconstruct evolutionary history, perform dating analyses, and infer species boundaries in the fungus-farming ant genus Sericomyrmex.
More...We use phylogenomic markers, ultraconserved elements (UCEs), to reconstruct evolutionary history, perform dating analyses, and infer species boundaries in the fungus-farming ant genus Sericomyrmex. This is first such attempt for the genus Sericomyrmex, which is known for its difficult taxonomy. Our study is the first to utilize UCEs to recover the relationships of closely related, recently diverged ant species, and we find that UCEs contain enough variation to capture recent species- and population-level divergences. Our analyses indicate that the number of species in Sericomyrmex (11) is less than previously described (19), even though we recognize 3 new species.
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