Mating frequency and fitness in a monogynous ant

虽然雄性可以通过额外的交配来增加繁殖成功率，但雌性的适应性通常更受它们可以产生的卵子数量的限制，而不是它们的配偶数量。然而，雌性多次交配（一妻多夫制）是动物中常见的现象。虽然关于一妻多夫制的适应价值的假设很多，但测试它们往往很困难。特别是在社会性昆虫，交配频率和女性健身之间的关联的研究经常保持相关性的有性很少在实验室中交配。工蚁将幼蚁王从一个巢穴带到另一个巢穴，以促进与其他殖民地的本地交配，无翼雄性的重复远系繁殖。我们将在交配期的不同时期中断女王携带，以获得只与一个或几个相关的男性，几个或许多其他无关的男性交配的女王。我们将允许这些交配后在实验室开始新的殖民地。我们将监测群体生长速度，后代质量和抗病性，并随后将这些性状与遗传决定的女王交配频率和近亲繁殖系数相关联。另外，通过结合现场观察，微卫星基因分型，控制交配和实验室操作，我们将明确测试以下假设：工作者诱导的多次交配增加了皇后的健身。工人们选择特定的殖民地来出口女性，即，间性选择（雌性选择）从雌性个体转移到不育个体。雌性个体的转移将雄性竞争扩大到整个种群的规模，并增加了交配后雄性之间的精子竞争。我们的研究将有助于解决行为生态学中的一个基本问题，同时也将阐明一种奇异的、迄今为止尚未研究过的行为--金龟子蚁的皇家配对--的进化意义。

While males can increase their reproductive success by additional matings, female fitness is typically more limited by the number of eggs they can produce than by the number of their mates. Nevertheless, female multiple mating (polyandry) is a common phenomenon in animals. While hypotheses on the adaptive value of polyandry abound, testing them has often been difficult. In particular in social insects, studies on the association between mating frequency and female fitness frequently remain correlative as sexuals rarely mate in the laboratory. Workers of the ant Cardiocondyla elegans carry young queens from nest to nest to promote repeated outbreeding with locally mating, wingless males in other colonies. We will interrupt queen carrying at different periods of the mating period to obtain queens that mated only with one or a few related males, a few, or many additional unrelated males. We will allow these mated queens to start new colonies in the laboratory. We will monitor colony growth rate, offspring quality, and disease resistance, and later correlate these traits with genetically determined queen mating frequencies and inbreeding coefficients. By additionally combining field observations, microsatellite genotyping, controlled mating and experimental manipulations in the lab we will explicitly test the following hypotheses:Worker-induced multiple mating increases the fitness of queens. Workers choose particular colonies for the export of female sexuals, i.e., intersexual selection (female choice) is shifted from female sexuals to sterile workers.The transfer of female sexuals widens male competition to a population-wide scale and increases post-copulatory sperm competition among males. Our study will contribute to a fundamental question in behavioral ecology and at the same time will shed light on the evolutionary meaning of a bizarre and hitherto unstudied behavior, royal matchmaking in Cardiocondyla ants.