Proximate determinants of reproductive skew in ant populations

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How reproductive rights are shared among group members and what determines reproductive skew are central questions in behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology. Numerous models explain the magnitude of skew from the relatedness among group members, their fighting strength and ecological constraints, but implicitly assume that individuals are capable of adaptively adjusting their behavior to the present environmental and social conditions. We intend to determine whether the reproductive behavior of queens of the ant Leptothorax acervorum from populations with different reproductive skew is flexible or genetically determined. We will therefore investigate the behavior of queens from several Spanish populations of L acervorum under common, but varied environmental conditions (i.e., after manipulating queen/worker ratios or under starvation), observe the behavior of young, mated queens that had been exchanged as pupae between high skew and low skew colonies, and attempt to cross queens from low skew populations with males from high skew populations and vice versa to determine the behavior of F1 offspring. Behavioral observations will be complemented by a phylogeographic analysis of L. acervorum in Spain using sequences of mt DNA (CO I / CO II) and microsatellite genotypes. We will determine the extent of gene flow between populations and estimate if and for how long the high skew population of Sra de Albarracin has been separated from the low skew populations in the Pyrenees and the Cantabrian Mts.