School of Biological Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA.
J Hered. 2021 Dec 17;112(7):626-634. doi: 10.1093/jhered/esab057.
Highly social species are successful because they cooperate in obligately integrated societies. We examined temporal genetic variation in the eusocial wasp Vespula maculifrons to gain a greater understanding of evolution in highly social taxa. First, we wished to test if effective population sizes of eusocial species were relatively low due to the reproductive division of labor that characterizes eusocial taxa. We thus estimated the effective population size of V. maculifrons by examining temporal changes in population allele frequencies. We sampled the genetic composition of a V. maculifrons population at 3 separate timepoints spanning a 13-year period. We found that effective population size ranged in the hundreds of individuals, which is similar to estimates in other, non-eusocial taxa. Second, we estimated levels of polyandry in V. maculifrons in different years to determine if queen mating system varied over time. We found no significant change in the number or skew of males mated to queens. In addition, mating skew was not significant within V. maculifrons colonies. Therefore, our data suggest that queen mate number may be subject to stabilizing selection in this taxon. Overall, our study provides novel insight into the selective processes operating in eusocial species by analyzing temporal genetic changes within populations.
高度社会化的物种之所以成功，是因为它们在强制性整合的社会中合作。我们研究了社会性黄蜂 Vespula maculifrons 的时间遗传变异，以更深入地了解高度社会化类群的进化。首先，我们希望测试社会性物种的有效种群规模是否由于社会性分类群的生殖分工而相对较低。因此，我们通过检查种群等位基因频率的时间变化来估计 V. maculifrons 的有效种群规模。我们在跨越 13 年的 3 个不同时间点对 V. maculifrons 种群的遗传组成进行了采样。我们发现有效种群规模在数百人之间，这与其他非社会性分类群的估计值相似。其次，我们估计了 V. maculifrons 在不同年份中的多配现象，以确定蜂王交配系统是否随时间变化。我们没有发现与蜂王交配的雄性数量或偏斜有显著变化。此外，V. maculifrons 群体内的交配偏斜并不显著。因此，我们的数据表明，在这个分类群中，女王配偶数量可能受到稳定选择的影响。总的来说，我们的研究通过分析种群内的时间遗传变化，为分析社会性物种中的选择过程提供了新的见解。
