Defense in Social Insects: Diversity, Division of Labor, and Evolution

2022 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 407-436
Author(s):  
Patrick Abbot
Keyword(s):  
Social Insects ◽  
Social Evolution ◽  
Ecological Factors ◽  
Context Dependency ◽  
Active Defense ◽  
Eusocial Insects ◽  
Gene Regulatory ◽  
Emerging Themes ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Diverse Groups

All social insects defend their colony from predators, parasites, and pathogens. In Oster and Wilson's classic work, they posed one of the key paradoxes about defense in social insects: Given the universal necessity of defense, why then is there so much diversity in mechanisms? Ecological factors undoubtedly are important: Predation and usurpation have imposed strong selection on eusocial insects, and active defense by colonies is a ubiquitous feature of all social insects. The description of diverse insect groups with castes of sterile workers whose main duty is defense has broadened the purview of social evolution in insects, in particular with respect to caste and behavior. Defense is one of the central axes along which we can begin to organize and understand sociality in insects. With the establishment of social insect models such as the honey bee, new discoveries are emerging regarding the endocrine, neural, and gene regulatory mechanisms underlying defense in social insects. The mechanisms underlying morphological and behavioral defense traits may be shared across diverse groups, providing opportunities for identifying both conserved and novel mechanisms at work. Emerging themes highlight the context dependency of and interaction between factors that regulate defense in social insects.

scholarly journals Morphological and genomic shifts in mole-rat ‘queens’ increase fecundity but reduce skeletal integrity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel A. Johnston ◽  
Philippe Vullioud ◽  
Jack Thorley ◽  
Henry Kirveslahti ◽  
Leyao Shen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Morphological Plasticity ◽  
Skeletal Morphology ◽  
Eusocial Insects ◽  
Mole Rat ◽  
Gene Regulatory ◽  
Reproductive Division Of Labor ◽  
Reproductive Division ◽  
Skeletal Integrity ◽  
Vertebral Growth

AbstractIn some mammals and many social insects, highly cooperative societies are characterized by reproductive division of labor, in which breeders and nonbreeders become behaviorally and morphologically distinct. While differences in behavior and growth between breeders and nonbreeders have been extensively described, little is known of their molecular underpinnings. Here, we investigate the consequences of breeding for skeletal morphology and gene regulation in highly cooperative Damaraland mole-rats. By experimentally assigning breeding ‘queen’ status versus nonbreeder status to age-matched littermates, we confirm that queens experience vertebral growth that likely confers advantages to fecundity. However, they also up-regulate bone resorption pathways and show reductions in femoral mass, which predicts increased vulnerability to fracture. Together, our results show that, as in eusocial insects, reproductive division of labor in mole-rats leads to gene regulatory rewiring and extensive morphological plasticity. However, in mole-rats, concentrated reproduction is also accompanied by costs to bone strength.

scholarly journals Morphological and genomic shifts in mole-rat 'queens' increase fecundity but reduce skeletal integrity

eLife ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel A Johnston ◽  
Philippe Vullioud ◽  
Jack Thorley ◽  
Henry Kirveslahti ◽  
Leyao Shen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Morphological Plasticity ◽  
Skeletal Morphology ◽  
Eusocial Insects ◽  
Mole Rat ◽  
Gene Regulatory ◽  
Reproductive Division Of Labor ◽  
Reproductive Division ◽  
Skeletal Integrity ◽  
Vertebral Growth

In some mammals and many social insects, highly cooperative societies are characterized by reproductive division of labor, in which breeders and nonbreeders become behaviorally and morphologically distinct. While differences in behavior and growth between breeders and nonbreeders have been extensively described, little is known of their molecular underpinnings. Here, we investigate the consequences of breeding for skeletal morphology and gene regulation in highly cooperative Damaraland mole-rats. By experimentally assigning breeding 'queen' status versus nonbreeder status to age-matched littermates, we confirm that queens experience vertebral growth that likely confers advantages to fecundity. However, they also up-regulate bone resorption pathways and show reductions in femoral mass, which predicts increased vulnerability to fracture. Together, our results show that, as in eusocial insects, reproductive division of labor in mole-rats leads to gene regulatory rewiring and extensive morphological plasticity. However, in mole-rats, concentrated reproduction is also accompanied by costs to bone strength.

Eusocial Insects as a Model for Understanding Altruism, Cooperation, and Levels of Selection

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heikki Helanterä
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Social Insect ◽  
Social Evolution ◽  
Inclusive Fitness ◽  
Family Structures ◽  
Major Transitions ◽  
Eusocial Insects ◽  
Insect Societies ◽  
Evolutionary Success

If the logic of natural selection is applied strictly at the level of individual production of offspring, sterile workers in insect societies are enigmatic. How can natural selection ever produce individuals that refrain from reproduction, and how are traits of such individuals that never produce offspring scrutinized and changed through natural selection? The solution to both questions is found in the family structures of insect societies. That is, the sterile helper individuals are evolutionary altruists that give up their own reproduction and instead are helping their kin reproduce and proliferate shared genes in the offspring of the fertile queen. Selection in such cases is not just a matter of individual’s direct reproduction, and instead of own offspring, the currency of the evolutionary success of sterile individuals is inclusive fitness. The concept of inclusive fitness and the process of kin selection are key to understanding the magnificent cooperation we see in insect societies, and reciprocally, insect societies are key case studies of inclusive fitness logic. In extreme cases, such as the highly advanced and sophisticated societies of ants, honeybees, and termites, the division of labor and interdependence of colony members is so complete, that it is justified to talk about a new level of evolutionary individuality. Such increases in the hierarchical complexity of life are called major transitions in evolution. We see adaptations of the colony, rather than individuals, in, e.g., their communication and group behaviors. The division of labor between morphologically differentiated queens and workers is analogous to germline-soma separation of a multicellular organism, justifying the term superorganism for the extreme cases of social lifestyle. Alongside these extreme cases, there is enormous diversity in the social lifestyles across social insect taxa, which provides a window into the balance of cooperation and conflict, and individual reproduction and helping others, in social evolution. Over the last decades, social insect research has been an area where the theoretical and empirical understanding have been developed hand in hand, together with examples of wonderful natural history, and has tremendously improved our understanding of evolution.

Social Ecology

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 356-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shigehiro Oishi ◽  
Jesse Graham
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Psychology ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
Ecological Factors ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
History Of ◽  
Basic And Applied Research ◽  
Religious Systems ◽  
And Behavior

This article presents a socioecological approach (accounting for physical, societal, and interpersonal environments) to psychological theorizing and research. First, we demonstrate that economic systems, political systems, religious systems, climates, and geography exert a distal yet important influence on human mind and behavior. Second, we summarize the historical precedents of socioecological psychology. There have been several waves of ecological movements with distinct emphases in the history of psychological science, such as K. Lewin’s (1936, 1939) field theory and U. Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) ecological approach to human development. Environmental and community psychologies, created in the late 1960s and early 1970s, promoted social activism through basic and applied research on ecological factors and social outcomes. Most recently, the rise of cultural psychology has encouraged psychologists to pay attention to cultural factors in basic psychological processes, but note that less attention has been given to socioecological factors per se. We highlight the benefits of bringing the socioecological perspective back to mainstream psychological theorizing and research.

scholarly journals Crystalline deposits reveal caste identity of late embryos and larvae of the ant Cardiocondyla obscurior

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Wallner ◽  
Eva Schultner ◽  
Jan Oettler
Keyword(s):  
Social Insects ◽  
Developmental Plasticity ◽  
Social Evolution ◽  
Reproductive Organs ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Crystalline Deposits ◽  
Reproductive Conflicts

Social insects are interesting models for the study of anticipatory developmental plasticity because of the striking differentiation into reproductive queens and functionally sterile workers. A few ant genera, including Cardiocondyla, represent the pinnacle of social evolution in the Hymenoptera, where workers have completely lost their reproductive organs, minimizing reproductive conflicts between queens and workers. Here we show that late embryos and larvae of queens of the ant C. obscurior can be identified by the appearance of urate deposits around the forming ovaries. The discovery of caste-specific urate patterns in C. obscurior and three additional Cardiocondyla species will facilitate future studies of developmental plasticity in ants.

scholarly journals Social Evolution With Decoupling of Multiple Roles of Biogenic Amines Into Different Phenotypes in Hymenoptera

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken Sasaki ◽  
Yasukazu Okada ◽  
Hiroyuki Shimoji ◽  
Hitoshi Aonuma ◽  
Toru Miura ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Biogenic Amines ◽  
Social Evolution ◽  
Reproductive Function ◽  
Social Behaviors ◽  
Dual Function ◽  
Signal Transduction Networks ◽  
Split Function ◽  
Reproductive Division Of Labor ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Eusocial Species

Convergent evolution of eusociality with the division of reproduction and its plastic transition in Hymenoptera has long attracted the attention of researchers. To explain the evolutionary scenario of the reproductive division of labor, several hypotheses had been proposed. Among these, we focus on the most basic concepts, i.e., the ovarian ground plan hypothesis (OGPH) and the split-function hypothesis (SFH). The OGPH assumes the physiological decoupling of ovarian cycles and behavior into reproductive and non-reproductive individuals, whereas the SFH assumes that the ancestral reproductive function of juvenile hormone (JH) became split into a dual function. Here, we review recent progress in the understanding of the neurohormonal regulation of reproduction and social behavior in eusocial hymenopterans, with an emphasis on biogenic amines. Biogenic amines are key substances involved in the switching of reproductive physiology and modulation of social behaviors. Dopamine has a pivotal role in the formation of reproductive skew irrespective of the social system, whereas octopamine and serotonin contribute largely to non-reproductive social behaviors. These decoupling roles of biogenic amines are seen in the life cycle of a single female in a solitary species, supporting OGPH. JH promotes reproduction with dopamine function in primitively eusocial species, whereas it regulates non-reproductive social behaviors with octopamine function in advanced eusocial species. The signal transduction networks between JH and the biogenic amines have been rewired in advanced eusocial species, which could regulate reproduction in response to various social stimuli independently of JH action.

scholarly journals A semantic parsing pipeline for context-dependent question answering over temporally structured data

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Charles Chen ◽  
Razvan Bunescu ◽  
Cindy Marling
Keyword(s):  
Speech Recognition ◽  
Question Answering ◽  
Data Augmentation ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Context Dependency ◽  
Sensor Data ◽  
Multiple Time ◽  
Semantic Parsing ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
And Behavior

Abstract We propose a new setting for question answering (QA) in which users can query the system using both natural language and direct interactions within a graphical user interface that displays multiple time series associated with an entity of interest. The user interacts with the interface in order to understand the entity’s state and behavior, entailing sequences of actions and questions whose answers may depend on previous factual or navigational interactions. We describe a pipeline implementation where spoken questions are first transcribed into text which is then semantically parsed into logical forms that can be used to automatically extract the answer from the underlying database. The speech recognition module is implemented by adapting a pre-trained long short-term memory (LSTM)-based architecture to the user’s speech, whereas for the semantic parsing component we introduce an LSTM-based encoder–decoder architecture that models context dependency through copying mechanisms and multiple levels of attention over inputs and previous outputs. When evaluated separately, with and without data augmentation, both models are shown to substantially outperform several strong baselines. Furthermore, the full pipeline evaluation shows only a small degradation in semantic parsing accuracy, demonstrating that the semantic parser is robust to mistakes in the speech recognition output. The new QA paradigm proposed in this paper has the potential to improve the presentation and navigation of the large amounts of sensor data and life events that are generated in many areas of medicine.

scholarly journals Social modularity: conserved genes and regulatory elements underlie caste-antecedent behavioural states in an incipiently social bee

2019 ◽  
Vol 286 (1916) ◽  
pp. 20191815 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wyatt A. Shell ◽  
Sandra M. Rehan
Keyword(s):  
Gene Expression ◽  
Social Evolution ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Regulatory Elements ◽  
Carpenter Bee ◽  
Eusocial Insects ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Evolutionary Origins ◽  
Conserved Genes ◽  
Insect Sociality

The evolutionary origins of advanced eusociality, one of the most complex forms of phenotypic plasticity in nature, have long been a focus within the field of sociobiology. Although eusocial insects are known to have evolved from solitary ancestors, sociogenomic research among incipiently social taxa has only recently provided empirical evidence supporting theories that modular regulation and deeply conserved genes may play important roles in both the evolutionary emergence and elaboration of insect sociality. There remains, however, a paucity of data to further test the biological reality of these and other evolutionary theories among taxa in the earliest stages of social evolution. Here, we present brain transcriptomic data from the incipiently social small carpenter bee, Ceratina calcarata , which captures patterns of cis -regulation and gene expression associated with female maturation, and underlying two well-defined behavioural states, foraging and guarding, concurrently demonstrated by mothers and daughters during early autumn. We find that an incipiently social nest environment may dramatically affect gene expression. We further reveal foraging and guarding behaviours to be putatively caste-antecedent states in C. calcarata , and offer strong empirical support for the operation of modular regulation, involving deeply conserved and differentially expressed genes in the expression of early social forms.

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