C04
C04
Proximate and ultimate mechanisms of social niche construction during colony founding in the ant Pogonomyrmex californicus
Jürgen Gadau
This project focuses on the genetic, epigenetic and transcriptomic basis of social niche construction during colony founding where individual queen-queen interactions lead to the realisation of individualised social niches. During colony founding, individual Pogonomyrmex californicus ant queens can choose to start a new colony alone (haplometrosis), or they can join or accept another co-founding queen/s (pleometrosis). During the first two weeks of colony founding, co-founding queens interact in multiple ways and such construct their individualised social niche. They either accept additional queens or they evict/kill them. Matched interactions, where pleometrotic queens interact with each other lead to a fitness gain whereas mismatched interactions where haplometrotic and pleometrotic queens interact lead to a fitness loss (for one or both). The frequency of these alternative founding strategies varies among subpopulations. In the second funding period, we will focus on three aims. Confirming and experimentally testing candidate genes (Aim 1) and epigenetic mechanisms (Aim 2), that we identified in the first funding period, and develop a generalised evolutionary framework (Fig.1) that takes into account the relation between genotype, phenotype, individualised social niche and fitness. In the first funding period we observed, that above a certain number of cofounding pleometrotic queens founding colonies will always fail because all queens remain passive and stop working (spiteful behaviour?). We will explore both empirically and theoretically (Aim 3) whether this is a constraint or an adaptation in the context of the evolution of pleometrosis. Hence, we try to understand how the individualised niche changes according to queen number.
