Abstract
Quantifying genetic structure and levels of genetic variation are
fundamentally important to predicting the ability of populations to
persist in human-altered landscapes and adapt to future environmental
changes. Genetic structure reflects the dispersal of individuals over
generations, which can be mediated by species-level traits or
environmental factors. Dispersal distances are commonly positively
associated with body size and negatively associated with the amount of
degraded habitat between sites, motivating investigation of these
potential drivers of dispersal concomitantly. We quantified genetic
structure and genetic variability within populations of ten bee species
in the tribe Euglossini across fragmented landscapes. We genotyped bees
at thousands of SNP loci and tested the following predictions: (1)
larger species disperse farther; (2) species with greater resource
specialization disperse farther; (3) deforested areas restrict
dispersal; and (4) sites surrounded by more intact habitat have higher
genetic diversity. Body size was a strong predictor of genetic
structure, but, surprisingly, larger species showed higher genetic
structure than smaller species. The way that deforestation affected
dispersal varied with body size, such that larger species dispersed less
far in areas with more forest. There was no effect of geographic
distance on dispersal, and sites with more intact habitat had higher
genetic diversity. These results challenge the dominant paradigm that
individuals of larger species disperse farther, motivating further work
into ecological drivers of dispersal for bees.