TECHNICAL NOTE Nine novel microsatellite markers for the army ant Simopelta pergandei (subfamily Ponerinae) Daniel J. C. Kronauer • Jacobus J. Boomsma • Naomi E. Pierce Received: 13 July 2010 / Accepted: 16 July 2010 / Published online: 28 July 2010 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 Abstract Simopelta (subfamily Ponerinae) army ants are specialized predators of other ants in New World tropical forests. Although they show a striking convergence in overall life-history with the well known army ants of the subfamilies Aenictinae, Dorylinae, and Ecitoninae, the genus has been little studied. We developed and charac- terized nine novel microsatellite loci for S. pergandei with 2–8 observed alleles (mean: 5.2) and expected heterozy- gosities between 0.16 and 0.87 (mean: 0.68). Three of these loci reliably cross-amplified in a second species, S. pen- tadentata, with 4–8 alleles (mean: 8.0) and expected het- erozygosities between 0.32 and 0.85 (mean: 0.65). These genetic markers will be useful in studying the sociobiology and molecular ecology of Simopelta army ants and in elucidating convergent evolutionary trajectories that have culminated in the army ant lifestyle. Keywords Formicidae Á Genetic marker Á Microsatellite Á Population genetics Á Sociobiology The New World army ant genus Simopelta (subfamily Ponerinae) presently comprises 21 species in two species groups (Mackay and Mackay 2008). Although Simopelta is phylogenetically only distantly related to the well known army ants in the subfamilies Aenictinae, Dorylinae, and Ecitoninae, they show a striking convergence in overall life-history (Gotwald and Brown 1966; Brady 2003; Mackay and Mackay 2008): (1) Queens are highly spe- cialized egg-layers and permanently wingless, which strongly suggests that they mate inside the nest and that colonies reproduce by fission; (2) Simopelta colonies are specialized predators of other ants; (3) although colonies are rarely encountered in the field, several observations suggest that they are nomadic. This combination of traits makes Simopelta an optimal system to study the evolution of army ant mating systems, colony pedigree structure, and social conflicts using a comparative approach. While the major groups of army ants studied so far have the highest queen-mating frequencies among the ants, it is still unclear how this idiosyncratic mating system relates to the army ant lifestyle in evolutionary terms (Kronauer et al. 2007). Furthermore, because army ant queens, unlike the queens of most ants, do not disperse on the wing, popu- lations are expected to be particularly sensitive to habitat fragmentation, which makes them interesting model sys- tems for conservation genetics (Berghoff et al. 2008). To address these issues, we developed nine novel microsatel- lite loci for the species Simopelta pergandei (curvata species group) (Table 1). We also tested these loci for cross-amplification in a second species, S. pentadentata (williamsi species group) (Table 2). Samples of S. pergandei were collected in Henri Pittier National Park, Venezuela, and samples of S. pentadentata were collected in and around the Monteverde Cloud Forest area, Costa Rica. All samples were collected directly into 96% EtOH. Genomic DNA for microsatellite isolation was extracted from entire homogenized S. pergandei workers D. J. C. Kronauer (&) Á N. E. Pierce Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA e-mail: dkron@fas.harvard.edu N. E. Pierce e-mail: npierce@oeb.harvard.edu J. J. Boomsma Centre for Social Evolution, Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 15, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: jjboomsma@bio.ku.dk 123 Conservation Genet Resour (2011) 3:61–63 DOI 10.1007/s12686-010-9290-6