A caste differentiation mutant elucidates the evolution of socially parasitic ants.

ABSTRACT: Most ant species have two distinct female castes-queens and workers-yet the developmental and genetic mechanisms that produce these alternative phenotypes remain poorly understood. Working with a clonal ant, we discovered a variant strain that expresses queen-like traits in individuals that would normally become workers. The variants show changes in morphology, behavior, and fitness that cause them to rely on workers in wild-type (WT) colonies for survival. Overall, they resemble the queens of many obligately parasitic ants that have evolutionarily lost the worker caste and live inside colonies of closely related hosts. The prevailing theory for the evolution of these workerless social parasites is that they evolve from reproductively isolated populations of facultative intermediates that

SUBMITTER: Trible W 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10050096 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature