The fecundity/longevitiy tradeoff in a clonal ant

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Evidence for the presumed absence of a fecundity/longevity trade-off in perennial eusocial insects stems mostly from comparative studies on workers and queens of honeybees and a few ant species. In these taxa, the two castes differ enormously in ontogeny, morphology, mating status, and the care they receive from workers. It is therefore not easy to disentangle the effects of the various factors on fitness parameters. In the present project we intend to investigate the interrelations among fecundity and longevity in the ant Platythyrea punctata, in which all workers are in principle capable of producing female offspring from unfertilized eggs through thelytokous parthenogenesis and colonies essentially consist of clones. We will compare the hormone titres and transcriptomes of reproductive and non-reproductive, genetically and morphologically identical clonemates of equal age and equally kept under a variety of environmental and social conditions to shed light on the endocrine and genomic pathways that ultimately control fecundity and aging.Furthermore, by manipulation of the workload of non-reproductives we will examine the role of "wear and tear" in aging in workers.