Characterization of 8 polymorphic microsatellite loci in the neotropical ant-garden ant, Camponotus femoratus (Fabricius)

Camponotus femoratus is an abundant and behaviorally dominant ant in lowland Amazonian rainforests, where this species participates in a complex and obligate seed-dispersal mutualism. C. femoratus typically cohabits with another ant species Crematogaster levior in an apparently amiable but poorly understood interaction. Despite these outstanding characteristics, the population genetics and dispersal patterns of C. femoratus are unknown. We isolated eight polymorphic microsatellite loci for C. femoratus from a genomic library enriched for di-, tri-, and tetra-nucleotide repeats. We detected 2 to 17 alleles per locus, with levels of observed heterozygosity ranging from 0.286 to 0.714.