Month: September 2022

SELECTION AT THE SOCIAL LEVEL. "The “superorganism” is more than a heuristic metaphor (e.g., queens are the colony’s ovaries and workers its soma) but that colonies indeed are organisms comprised of organisms that undergo selection as a single entity at a level above that of gene and individual." https://lnkd.in/dS_w2bD View in LinkedIn

QUORUM SENSING IN INSECT COLONIES. "Social insect colonies are an excellent example of a decentralized system, because no individual is in charge of directing or making decisions for the colony. Several groups of social insects have been shown to use quorum sensing in a process that resembles collective decision-making." http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing View in LinkedIn

TASK ALLOCATION. "One of the major drivers in the evolution of social complexity is task partitioning between group members. In social insects it is taken to extremes in the form of reproductive (queen) and non-reproductive (worker, soldier) castes." https://lnkd.in/d42MTRa View in LinkedIn

EPIGENETIC FACTORS. "Queens and workers are different phenotypes arising from the same genome ... whether an individual becomes a queen or worker depends on how it responds to environmental stimuli at critical periods in caste determination, rather than genotypic differences. Phenotypic variation exhibited by castes therefore usually arises through differential expression of shared genes." https://lnkd.in/d42MTRa View in LinkedIn

PHEROMONES AND ANTS. "One of the early studies of swarm intelligence investigated the foraging behavior of ants. It had long been known that the ant “highways” often seen in nature (and in people’s kitchens) are laid down by individual ants depositing pheromone, a chemical attractant, which increases the probability that other ants will follow the same path to the food source." https://lnkd.in/dDUTsM2 View in LinkedIn

SOCIALITY GENES? "The genomes of many social insects exhibit unique properties that appear to be associated with sociality. For example the haplodiploid genetic system, found in all Hymenoptera (bees, wasps and ants), can provide the basis for eusocial evolution by providing relatedness incentives for sib-rearing." https://lnkd.in/d42MTRa View in LinkedIn

CHROMOSOMES AND SOCIALITY. "Social insects tend to have higher chromosome numbers than their non-social counterparts ... worker specialisation in ants roughly correlates positively with chromosome number." https://lnkd.in/d42MTRa View in LinkedIn

RECOMBINATION RATES. "High rates of molecular evolution may have driven social evolution. The honeybee ... has a very high recombination rate and exhibits great colony-level genetic diversity, whilst more primitively-eusocial species ... and solitary species ... have much lower recombination rates ... these data suggest that social complexity and recombination rates are positively correlated." https://lnkd.in/d42MTRa View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR EVOLUTION. "Whether a high rate of molecular evolution is a cause or consequence of sociality, it will certainly give rise to the evolution of new genes or new gene functions through gene duplication, single nucleotide substitutions, insertions or deletions. There is already evidence for this as some conserved genes have novel functions in social animals." https://lnkd.in/d42MTRa View in LinkedIn

MUTATIONS AND SOCIABILITY. "Krieger and Ross (2002) recently identified for the first time a gene that determines a complex social behaviour, illustrating that simple nucleotide mutations can strongly influence sociality. They showed that allelic differences in the gene Gp-9 in the fire ant Solenopsis invicta determine whether a colony will be single- or multi-queened." https://lnkd.in/d42MTRa View in LinkedIn