Konsistenz und proximate Mechanismen von genetischen Effekten auf Verhalten bei Ameisen
Evolution, Anthropologie
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
Eusocial insects (ants, termites, some bees and wasps) form among the most ecologically dominant and successful societies in the animal kingdom, which is largely attributed to their division of labor. A lot of effort went into disentangling the factors regulating the self-organized functioning of these societies. The DFG project aimed to shed new light on how the genetic background and social environment regulate division of labor in ant societies. We studied division of labor on multiple levels of organization by investigating individual-level, grouplevel, and colony-level behavior and performance. We used complex experimental manipulations and behavioral tests of hundreds of workers to provide evidence for genetic effects on behavior and personality in the Argentine ant, Linepithema humile. We are now in the process of analyzing RNA-seq data generated by Marina Psalti during her PhD to identify transcriptomic changes that correlate with such intrinsic behavioral variation. Furthermore, we investigated the social regulation of behavior in founding queens of the black garden ant, Lasius niger. We focused on how founding queens transition from expressing behavioral pluripotency to becoming strictly specialized in egg production in the ontogenic process of colony foundation. We conducted complex experimental manipulations of the social environment to demonstrate that the presence of workers is necessary and sufficient to initiate and maintain the queen behavioral specialization. These findings may reshape our understanding of the functioning of insect societies. Finally, we investigated how worker diversity affects the performance of small L. niger colonies. We found that an experimental increase of worker diversity had a positive impact on the production of larvae. These results support the hypothesis that strategies increasing the diversity in social insect colonies may have been selected for because they increase the efficiency of division of labor.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
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Caste Differentiation. Encyclopedia of Social Insects (2020), 1-5. American Geophysical Union (AGU).
Psalti, Marina N. & Libbrecht, Romain
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Experimental increase of worker diversity benefits brood production in ants. BMC Ecology and Evolution, 21(1).
Psalti, Marina N.; Gohlke, Dustin & Libbrecht, Romain
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Ontogeny of superorganisms: Social control of queen specialization in ants. (2022, 3, 9). American Geophysical Union (AGU).
Majidifar, Vahideh; Psalti, Marina N.; Coulm, Martin; Fetzer, Ebru; Teggers, Eva-Maria; Rotering, Frederik; Grünewald, Judith; Mannella, Luca; Reuter, Maxi; Unte, Dennis & Libbrecht, Romain
