Relatedness modulates reproductive competition among queens in ant societies with multiple queens
Helanterä, Heikki; Ozan, Martina; Sundström, Liselotte (2023-02-27)
Heikki Helanterä, Martina Ozan, Liselotte Sundström, Relatedness modulates reproductive competition among queens in ant societies with multiple queens, Behavioral Ecology, Volume 34, Issue 3, May/June 2023, Pages 340–345, https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arad004
© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe20230922136200
Tiivistelmä
Abstract
Reproductive sharing in animal groups with multiple breeders, insects and vertebrates alike, contains elements of both conflict and cooperation, and depends on both relatedness between co-breeders, as well as their internal and external conditions. We studied how queens of the ant Formica fusca adjust their reproductive efforts in response to experimental manipulations of the kin competition regime in their nest. Queens respond to the presence of competitors by increasing their egg laying efforts, but only if the competitors are highly fecund and distantly related. Such a mechanism is likely to decrease harmful competition among close relatives. We demonstrate that queens of Formica fusca fine-tune their cooperative breeding behaviors in response to kinship and fecundity of others in a remarkably precise and flexible manner.
Kokoelmat
- Avoin saatavuus [38840]
