1 Department of Environment and Genetics and Centre for Future Landscapes La Trobe University Bundoora Vic. Australia.
2 School of Biosciences Cardiff University Cardiff UK.
3 Department of Zoology and Entomology University of Pretoria Pretoria South Africa.
4 Department of Earth, Ocean and Ecological Sciences University of Liverpool Liverpool UK.
5 Department of Biology Concordia University Montreal QC Canada.
6 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology University of Michigan Ann Arbor MI USA.
7 Section for Ecology and Evolution, Department of Biology University of Copenhagen Copenhagen Denmark.
8 Department of Biological Sciences Macquarie University NSW Australia.
9 Department of Applied Ecology North Carolina State University Raleigh NC USA.
10 Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment Western Sydney Univer

Current global challenges call for a rigorously predictive ecology. Our understanding of ecological strategies, imputed through suites of measurable functional traits, comes from decades of work that largely focussed on plants. However, a key question is whether plant ecological strategies resemble those of other organisms.Among animals, ants have long been recognised to possess similarities with plants: as (largely) central place foragers. For example, individual ant workers play similar foraging roles to plant leaves and roots and are similarly expendable. Frameworks that aim to understand plant ecological strategies through key functional traits, such as the 'leaf economics spectrum', offer the potential for significant parallels with ant ecological strategies.Here, we explore these parallels across several proposed ecological strategy dimensions, including an 'economic spectrum', propagule size-number trade-offs, apparency-defence trade-offs, resource acquisition trade-offs and stress-tolerance trade-offs. We also highlight where ecological strategies may differ between plants and ants. Furthermore, we consider how these strategies play out among the different modules of eusocial organisms, where selective forces act on the worker and reproductive castes, as well as the colony.Finally, we suggest future directions for ecological strategy research, including highlighting the availability of data and traits that may be more difficult to measure, but should receive more attention in future to better understand the ecological strategies of ants. The unique biology of eusocial organisms provides an unrivalled opportunity to bridge the gap in our understanding of ecological strategies in plants and animals and we hope that this perspective will ignite further interest. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.