Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Mol Ecol. 2011 Jan;20(2):420-8. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-294X.2010.04945.x. Epub 2010 Dec 2.
Altruism in social insects has evolved between closely related full-siblings. It is therefore of considerable interest why some groups have secondarily evolved low within-colony relatedness, which in turn affects the relatedness incentives of within-colony cooperation and conflict. The highest queen mating frequencies, and therefore among the lowest degrees of colony relatedness, occur in Apis honeybees and army ants of the subfamilies Aenictinae, Ecitoninae, and Dorylinae, suggesting that common life history features such as reproduction by colony fission and male biased numerical sex-ratios have convergently shaped these mating systems. Here we show that ponerine army ants of the genus Simopelta, which are distantly related but similar in general biology to other army ants, have strictly monandrous queens. Preliminary data suggest that workers reproduce in queenright colonies, which is in sharp contrast to other army ants. We hypothesize that differences in mature colony size and social complexity may explain these striking discrepancies.
社会性昆虫中的利他行为是在密切相关的全同胞之间进化而来的。因此，很有必要探讨为什么有些群体在进化过程中会出现较低的群体内亲缘关系，而这反过来又会影响群体内合作和冲突的亲缘关系激励。在 Apis 蜜蜂和 Aenictinae、Ecitoninae 和 Dorylinae 亚科的行军蚁中，最高的蜂王交配频率，因此也是最低的群体内亲缘关系程度，表明共同的生活史特征，如群体分裂繁殖和雄性偏向的数值性别比，共同塑造了这些交配系统。在这里，我们展示了与其他行军蚁在一般生物学上相似但亲缘关系较远的 Simopelta 属的兵蚁具有严格的单配偶蜂王。初步数据表明，工蚁在有女王的群体中繁殖，这与其他行军蚁形成鲜明对比。我们假设成熟群体大小和社会复杂性的差异可能解释了这些显著的差异。
