TY - JOUR T1 - Convergent evolution of the army ant syndrome and congruence in big-data phylogenetics JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/134064 SP - 134064 AU - Marek L. Borowiec Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/04/134064.abstract N2 - The evolution of the suite of morphological and behavioral adaptations underlying the ecological success of army ants has been the subject of considerable debate. This “army ant syn-drome” has been argued to have arisen once or multiple times within the ant subfamily Dorylinae. To address this question I generated data from 2,166 loci and a comprehensive taxon sampling for a phylogenetic investigation. Most analyses show strong support for convergent evolution of the army ant syndrome in the Old and New World but certain relationships are sensitive to analytics. I examine the signal present in this data set and find that conflict is diminished when only loci less likely to violate common phylogenetic model assumptions are considered. I also provide a temporal and spatial context for doryline evolution with timecalibrated, biogeographic, and diversification rate shift analyses. This study underscores the need for cautious analysis of phylogenomic data and calls for more efficient algorithms employing better-fitting models of molecular evolution.Significance Recent interpretation of army ant evolution holds that army ant behavior and morphology originated only once within the subfamily Dorylinae. An inspection of phylogenetic signal in a large new data set shows that support for this hypothesis may be driven by bias present in the data. Convergent evolution of the army ant syndrome is consistently supported when sequences violating assumptions of a commonly used model of sequence evolution are excluded from the analysis. This hypothesis also fits with a simple scenario of doryline biogeography. These results highlight the importance of careful evaluation of signal and conflict within phylogenomic data sets, even when taxon sampling is comprehensive. ER -