Social Evolution in Ants

By A. Bourke, Nigel R. Franks. 2019

675 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Biologists have long been intrigued and confounded by the complex issues in the evolution and ecology of the social behaviour of insects. The self-sacrifice of sterile workers in ant colonies has been particularly difficult for evolutionary biologists to explain. This text presents an overview of the current state of scientific knowledge about social evolution in ants and shows how studies on ants have contributed to an understanding of many fundamental topics in behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology. The book explains kin selection theory and sex ratio theory and their applications to social evolution in insects. Aiming to dispel lingering skepticism about the validity of kin selection and, more broadly, of "selfish gene" theory, the authors show how these ideas underpin the evolution of both co-operation and conflict within ant societies. In addition, using simple algebra, they provide detailed explanations of key mathematical models. Finally, they discuss two relatively little-known topics in ant social biology: life history strategy and mating systems.

Subfields: Genetics

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Citations in the corpus

Multiagent Bidirectionally-Coordinated Nets: Emergence of Human-level Coordination in Learning to Play StarCraft Combat Games (2017, background): “hich is otherwise unthinkable by a single person. Even social animals like a brood of well-organised ants could accomplish challenging tasks such as hunting, building a kingdom, and even waging a war [12], although each ant by itself is weak and limited. Interestingly, in the coming era of algorithm”
Variation in Individual Investment Strategies among Social Animals (2006, background): “…into separate castes associated with extreme specialization for particular tasks (Wilson 1971; Schmid-Hempel 1990; Keller & Vargo 1993; Bourke & Franks 1995; Calderone 1995; Traniello & Ethology 112 (2006) 729–747 ª 2006 The Author 734 Journal compilation ª 2006 Blackwell Verlag,…”
Conflict over male parentage in stingless bees (2004, neutral): “Social groups, however, are predisposed to internal conflicts and these conflicts potentially weaken the forces that hold colonies together (Trivers and Hare, 1976; Bourke and Franks, 1995; Queller and Strassmann, 1998).”
Split sex ratios in the social Hymenoptera: a meta-analysis (2008, methodology): “…is fundamental to understanding a wide variety of evolutionary phenomena such as the evolution of altruism and spite, the emergence of eusociality, and the presence of kin conflicts (Hamilton 1964, 1970, 1972; Bourke and Franks 1995; Gardner and West 2004; Ratnieks et al. 2006; West et al. 2007).”
Influence of colony genotypic composition on the performance of hygienic behaviour in the honeybee, Apis mellifera L. (2001, background): “Our results lend support to the possibility that demand for a task within the colony can regulate the rate of behavioural ontogeny (Tofts & Franks 1992; Franks & Tofts 1994; Bourke & Franks 1995; Calderone 1998) even in a colony that has a normal age structure.”
Immune responses of bumblebee workers as a function of individual and colony age: senescence versus plastic adjustment of the immune function (2009, background): “In addition, the workers are important to collect resources and to raise brood (Bourke and Franks 1995).”
Sociobiology of slave-making ants (2001, positive): “Furthermore, models explaining the enormous intra- and interspecific variation of reproductive tactics of queens of social insects and particularly ants (Herbers 1993; Bourke and Heinze 1994; Bourke and Franks 1995; Heinze and Tsuji 1995) might perhaps be extended to include parasitic founding.”
Meerkat helpers do not specialize in particular activities (2003, background): “In many eusocial insects, reproductives are morphologically distinct from workers, which are differentiated into subcastes that perform different tasks within the colony (Wilson 1971; Keller & Vargo 1993; Bourke & Franks 1995).”
Female mating frequencies in Bombus spp. from Central Europe (2000, background): “Consequently, a number of hypotheses have therefore been suggested to account for the adaptive benefits of multiple mating (Boomsma and Ratnieks, 1996; Bourke and Franks, 1995 ).”
Polydomy in ants: what we know, what we think we know, and what remains to be done (2007, neutral): “Most ant species are multicolonial (i.e. populations consist of entities that function largely independently; Bourke & Franks, 1995), and these include both monodomous and polydomous species.”
Paternity, reproduction and conflict in vespine wasps: a model system for testing kin selection predictions (2001, background): “The study of conflicts and their resolution has been central to our current understanding of kin selection theory (Hamilton 1964; Bourke and Franks 1995; Crozier and Pamilo 1996; Keller and Reeve 1999) and natural selection (Leigh 1999).”
Policing in queenless ponerine ants (2001, background): “Finally, in some ants (Bourke and Franks 1995) and meliponine bees (Inoue et al.”