Amdam Gro V, Csondes Angela, Fondrk M Kim, Page Robert E
Arizona State University, School of Life Sciences, Tempe, Arizona 85287, USA.
Nature. 2006 Jan 5;439(7072):76-8. doi: 10.1038/nature04340.
A fundamental goal of sociobiology is to explain how complex social behaviour evolves, especially in social insects, the exemplars of social living. Although still the subject of much controversy, recent theoretical explanations have focused on the evolutionary origins of worker behaviour (assistance from daughters that remain in the nest and help their mother to reproduce) through expression of maternal care behaviour towards siblings. A key prediction of this evolutionary model is that traits involved in maternal care have been co-opted through heterochronous expression of maternal genes to result in sib-care, the hallmark of highly evolved social life in insects. A coupling of maternal behaviour to reproductive status evolved in solitary insects, and was a ready substrate for the evolution of worker-containing societies. Here we show that division of foraging labour among worker honey bees (Apis mellifera) is linked to the reproductive status of facultatively sterile females. We thereby identify the evolutionary origin of a widely expressed social-insect behavioural syndrome, and provide a direct demonstration of how variation in maternal reproductive traits gives rise to complex social behaviour in non-reproductive helpers.
社会生物学的一个基本目标是解释复杂的社会行为如何演化，尤其是在社会性昆虫中，社会性昆虫是群居生活的典范。尽管仍然存在诸多争议，但最近的理论解释聚焦于工蚁行为（留在巢穴中的女儿们提供帮助，协助母亲繁殖）的进化起源，这种行为是通过对兄弟姐妹表现出母性关怀行为而产生的。这个进化模型的一个关键预测是，参与母性关怀的性状通过母性基因的异时表达被用于产生对姐妹的关怀，这是昆虫高度进化的社会生活的标志。母性行为与生殖状态的关联在独居昆虫中就已演化出来，并且是含工蚁社会进化的现成基础。我们在此表明，工蜂（西方蜜蜂）之间的觅食劳动分工与兼性不育雌蜂的生殖状态有关。我们由此确定了一种广泛存在的社会性昆虫行为综合征的进化起源，并直接证明了母性生殖性状的变异如何在非生殖性帮手身上产生复杂的社会行为。
