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TANDEM RUNNING. "Certain ants find new nest sites by individuals signaling new sites by a timed running motion, where longer times indicate greater uncertainty. As more ants inspect the candidate sites, a quorum is reached to make the group decision to move, despite not all the ants will have inspected all the sites." http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing View in LinkedIn

QUORUM DECISIONS. "When its nest is damaged, a colony of the ant ... skillfully emigrates to the best available new site ... the quorum requirement can help a colony choose the best available site, even when few ants have the opportunity to compare sites directly." https://lnkd.in/dK2Sn4M 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

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

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

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

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

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

BEE PHEROMONES. "The needs of a honey bee colony are communicated between bees by pheromones, chemical signals which trigger behavioral responses. Honey bees have a variant of the same foraging gene that controls the onset of foraging behavior. Elevated expression of this gene correlates with increased foraging activity." http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics_of_social_behavior 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