Evolution of Complex Colony Structure in Social Insects

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Non-technical Summary, Herbers, J. IBN-9507377 Evolution of Complex Colony Structure in Social Insects Social behavior is the outgrowth of interactions among individuals. Social systems are complexes of behavioral traits that have evolved within a species in response to certain environmental conditions. The goal of this project is to understand how particular environmental conditions affect social systems in insects. The PI has previously studied two populations of the forest ant Myrmica punctiventris. One population near Burlington Vermont, has ant colonies that contain a single queen and all her daughter workers. Within those colonies the queen lays her eggs, and the workers care for them, forage for food, keep the nest clean, and so on. A second population near Albany, New York is vastly different in its social system from the Vermont population. There, a colony can contain a family of queens and a separate family of workers. Two completely different families share living quarters, with one family dominating the egg-laying and the second family doing the work. The goal of the present project is to understand the environmental conditions that have driven the Vermont and New York populations in two such different directions. The researchers will manipulate food availability and availability of nesting sites in a large field experiment. By charting occupancy of nests and reproductive biology throughout the three-year experiment, they should be able to determine if and how these two environmental factors affect social systems. The PI will also will continue detailed genetic work on this species. She will clone DNA to find suitable markers to use in genetic experiments. These DNA markers will yield information on who is the mother and who is the father of workers and reproductives in ant nests. With these data, it will be possible to measure the importance of genetic determinants of social systems as well.