Titre
Unequal partitioning of reproduction and investment between cooperating queens in the fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, as revealed by microsatellites
Type
article
Institution
UNIL/CHUV/Unisanté + institutions partenaires
Auteur(s)
Bernasconi, G.
Auteure/Auteur
Krieger, M. J. B.
Auteure/Auteur
Keller, L.
Auteure/Auteur
Liens vers les personnes
Liens vers les unités
ISSN
0962-8452
Statut éditorial
Publié
Date de publication
1997-09
Volume
264
Numéro
1386
Première page
1331
Dernière page/numéro d’article
1336
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Notes
Xy660 Times Cited:15 Cited References Count:48 --- Old month value: Sep 22
Résumé
Social insects provide ideal systems for investigating how kinship and ecological factors affect cooperation and conflict. In many ant species, unrelated queens cooperate to initiate new colonies. However, fights between queens break out after the eclosion of the first workers, leading to the death of all but one queen. Queens within associations potentially face a trade-off. On one hand, a queen should restrain her investment in brood production and care if this helps her to maintain fighting ability. On the other hand, a queen may benefit by increasing her contribution to brood production if having more daughter workers than her cofoundresses enhances her chances of taking over the colony. Increased investment is also beneficial because a large brood enhances colony survival. Using microsatellites, we determined the maternity of workers (adults and larvae) at the time of queen execution in the fire ant, Solenopsis invicta. Differential mass loss by initially equal nestmates affected survival, with the queen losing less body mass being more likely to survive. Surprisingly, the queen which lost less body mass, that is the one which provided the lowest energy investment, was the one which achieved higher maternity. A control experiment indicated that interactions among queens are responsible for this differential partitioning of reproductive and investment tasks between nestmates. The finding that the queen most likely to win the fights is the one with above-average maternity may explain why workers apparently do not attempt to influence the outcome of fights.
Sujets
PID Serval
serval:BIB_25783879BD91
Date de création
2008-01-24T17:39:57.182Z
Date de création dans IRIS
2025-05-20T15:50:29Z