HEИндивидуална стипендия2023–2025

AntPolice · Relatedness and the Evolutionary Pathway to Worker Sterility in Ants

„Хоризонт Европа“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2023-09-01 → 2025-09-30
Финансиране от ЕС: 200 860 €
Участници: 1
Схема: HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

Линиите свързват координатора с партньорите.

Накратко на български

Мравчешката стерилност се изследва чрез сравнение между две теории: дали работниците спират да снасят яйца заради „полицейски“ контрол от сестрите си или заради моногамията на кралицата. Това помага да се разбере как е възникнало екстремното сътрудничество в природата.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

Relatedness and the Evolutionary Pathway to Worker Sterility in Ants

In some ant colonies, the queens aren't the only ones laying eggs. Workers sometimes lay eggs too, but their sisters "police" this behaviour by destroying their nephews! This "ant policing" could be of profound evolutionary importance. It's thought to have played a key role in the evolution of a sterile worker caste among the ants. Why lay eggs if they will be destroyed? There is another hypothesis for the evolution of worker sterility, however. According to the "monogamy" hypothesis, you don't need policing, queens just need to be monogamous. Monogamy ensures that workers are raising full siblings, the genetic equivalent of their own young. As workers can then pass on their genes indirectly through their mother, sterility can evolve. AntPolice will test between these alternatives for the evolution of worker sterility by combining two approaches. First, ancestral states will be estimated to determine when in evolutionary time worker sterility evolved and if it was preceded by policing or monogamy (or both). Second, experiments with the ant Formica exsecta will be conducted to test if "ant policing" is good or bad for the colony. Figuring this out is important. There is no test so far of the policing vs monogamy evolutionary routes to worker sterility. AntPolice will therefore fill a crucial gap in our knowledge about the origins of extreme cooperation. The results are potentially paradigm shifting as high relatedness is the currently the textbook explanation for the evolution of worker sterility.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

The sterile worker castes found in the colonies of social insects are often cited as archetypal examples of altruism in nature. The challenge is to explain why losing the ability to reproduce has evolved as a superior strategy for transmitting genes into future generations. The leading explanation for the evolution of worker sterility is the monogamy hypothesis. The idea is that workers don't need to reproduce because they can transmit their genes indirectly by improving the reproductive success of the queen, who carries the same genes. For this to work, the queen should be monogamously mated, ensuring workers are raising full siblings, the genetic equivalent of their own young (r = 0.5). There has been no appropriate test of this hypothesis, however, and an alternative hypothesis, that worker sterility evolved via the enforcement of cooperation by policing, has not been ruled out. According to the policing hypothesis, workers suppress each other's reproduction by eating each other’s eggs or through aggression, leading to sterility through evolutionary time. Crucially, policing is predicted to evolve when relatedness is low, in contrast to the monogamy hypothesis.Here, I propose an interdisciplinary approach that combines a cutting-edge phylogenetic comparative analysis across ~500 ant species with novel lab-based experiments on the socially polymorphic ant, Formica exsecta, to test between the low and high relatedness evolutionary pathways to worker sterility. Contrary to common belief, workers in most ant species can lay eggs due to their haplodiploid sex determination system, making them an ideal system for answering this question. This project will fill a crucial gap in our knowledge of how complex life on Earth evolved and potentially overturn the long-held hypothesis that high relatedness is the only route to cooperation.

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

OULUN YLIOPISTO · OuluКоординаторФинландия