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Author: Kjeldgaard, MacKenzie
Email: mkjeldgaard@tamu.edu
Phone: 303-918-0470
Organization: Texas A&M University
Address:
TAMU 2475,
College Station,
TX,
77843
Abstract Title: QUANTIFYING THE DIET OF THE RED IMPORTED FIRE ANT (SOLENOPSIS INVICTA) IN TEXAS. MacKenzie Kjeldgaard, Jason Wulff, Gregory Sword, and Micky Eubanks, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX.
Abstract Text: We performed a next-generation sequencing (NGS) molecular gut content analysis of red imported fire ant (Solenopsis invicta) brood in natural and agricultural ecosystems in Texas. The red imported fire ant is a major invasive pest throughout Texas and the southern U.S., suppressing the abundance of native arthropods and costing millions of dollars per year in control. It is important to understand what these ants eat to better understand their ecological impact and design more effective management practices. A subterranean lifestyle, however, makes ant diet difficult to assess. Molecular gut content analysis bypasses these difficulties and allows us to quantify ant diet. We extracted DNA from fire ant brood collected from field sites in Texas varying in habitat type. We chose to use 4th instar brood because they process solid food for the colony and retain this digested food until prepupation, potentially prolonging our ability to detect consumed prey DNA. We collected 4th instars from five sites that included differently managed cotton fields and one natural site. We extracted DNA and amplified a mitochondrial COI fragment, the gene most commonly used in DNA barcoding to identify animal species. We then sequenced the pooled amplicons on an Illumina HiSeq 2500. We identified nine different arthropod orders consumed by fire ants across all sites, with the highest representation in Orthoptera and Lepidoptera. We found that fire ant diet correlated with crop management practices. This technique will be expanded with greater spatial and temporal sampling to determine fire ant impacts on communities.
Conference
Year: TIPPC_2016
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
Presenter Type (Student or Regular): Student
Session: 4. Research
Submission Date: 2016-02-11
