In June 2004, I also identified the ant occupants and phase of colony development

in the distal, most recently produced, two or three domatia from a single branch

haphazardly selected from 5-yr-old trees (n = 60) that were not used in the whole-tree

analysis. I tested for interspecific differences in colonization frequency of these domatia

using chi-square tests, for which I assumed a null hypothesis that newly produced

domatia would have an equal likelihood of being empty, being colonized by the same

species that occupied the nearest node down the branch, or being colonized by a different

species.

 Although the Huertos Project replicated plant age treatments at the plot level, in

this study I treated plants as independent replicates because ant species were patchily

distributed among the plots and I was primarily concerned with variation in ant

communities at the level of individual trees or domatia within trees. Data were

transformed to satisfy the requirements of parametric tests when appropriate. Analyses

were conducted with SPSS 13.0 and R 2.2.0.

 Results

Ant Community Composition

 The whole-tree inventory included 9051 domatia (n = 664 from 1-yr-old trees, n =

3430 from 2-yr-old trees and n = 4957 from 5-yr-old trees) in which we identified 11 ant

species. The four most abundant species across all plant ages, together accounting for

over 97% of occupied domatia, were Aztecapittieri (35 trees, 3113 domatia),

Crematogaster carinata (19 trees, 1677 domatia), Cephalotes setulifer (23 trees, 714

domatia), and Pseudomyrmexfortis (7 trees, 235 domatia). Others species found were

Cephalotes multispinosus, Crematogaster curvispinosa, Wasmannia auropunctata,