Takata Mamoru, Nagai Shuya, Inagaki Tatsuya, Ohkubo Yusaku, Tasaki Eisuke, Matsuura Kenji
Laboratory of Insect Ecology, Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto Universit, Kitashirakawa-Oiwake-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan.
School of Life Science and Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technolog, 2-12-1, Ookayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8550, Japan.
iScience. 2023 Feb 15;26(3):106207. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.106207. eCollection 2023 Mar 17.
The ecological success of social insects is attributed to the division of labor, where newly hatched offspring differentiate into either fertile progeny or functionally sterile worker castes. There is growing evidence for the heritable (genetic or epigenetic) effects on caste determination based on laboratory experiments. Here, we indirectly demonstrate that heritable factors have the principal role in caste determination and strongly affect colony-level production of both sexes of fertile dispersers (i.e., alates) in field colonies of the termite . An egg-fostering experiment suggests that the colony-dependent sex-specific caste fates were almost entirely determined before oviposition. Our investigation of field colonies revealed that such colony-dependent sex-specific caste fates result in the intercolonial variation in the numerical sex ratio of differentiated fertile offspring and, eventually, that of alates. This study contributes to better understanding the mechanisms underlying the division of labor and life-history traits in social insects.
社会性昆虫在生态上的成功归因于分工，新孵化的后代会分化为可育后代或功能不育的工蚁等级。基于实验室实验，越来越多的证据表明存在影响等级决定的可遗传（遗传或表观遗传）效应。在此，我们间接证明了可遗传因素在等级决定中起主要作用，并强烈影响白蚁野外蚁群中可育扩散者（即有翅成虫）两性的蚁群水平产量。一项卵寄养实验表明，依赖蚁群的性别特异性等级命运几乎在产卵前就完全确定了。我们对野外蚁群的调查显示，这种依赖蚁群的性别特异性等级命运导致分化的可育后代以及最终有翅成虫的数量性别比例在蚁群间存在差异。这项研究有助于更好地理解社会性昆虫分工和生活史特征背后的机制。
