Sentences with word «eusociality»

«These findings suggest that the evolution of eusociality in Synalpheus shrimp has left a signal in the allometry of female reproduction and defense.»

A new study by a team of KU Leuven and international researchers has found that the chemical structure of queen pheromones in wasps, ants and some bees is strikingly similar, even though these insects are separated by millions of years of evolution and each evolved eusociality independently of the other.

But Jamie Hunt, a zoologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, says the work has «serious shortcomings,» showing only that monogamy correlates with eusociality without necessarily causing it.

From this, the researchers concluded that saturated hydrocarbons act as a conserved class of queen pheromones in ants, bees and wasps — a surprising finding because these insects started diverging some 145 million years ago and each evolved eusociality independently.

They came out with a new mathematical model to explain eusociality.

The degree of eusociality varies amongst Synalpheus species, however, raising the question of whether queens of different species also have different strategies for allocating their resources between defense and reproduction.

Eusociality occurs in a range of arthropods, from some shrimp, beetles, and aphids, to various wasps, though the phenomenon is nowhere more pronounced than in honey bees, ants, and termites.

It turns out that there's only one condition that has to be reached in the course of evolution for eusociality to emerge: A mother or father must raise their young within reach of adequate resources at a defensible nest.

And Wilson isn't ready to abandon his theory, either: «These authors are outstanding researchers,» he says, but «they do not prove that [monogamy] predisposes species towards eusociality.»

Close kinship was not the source of insect eusociality but simply a byproduct, Wilson argued.

When Hughes's group examined the distribution of monogamous versus polygamous species among the eight branches of the family tree in which eusociality had independently evolved, the researchers concluded that each branch had started with a monogamous species.

Within Hymenoptera, considerable interest has focused on the role that eusociality plays in shaping the evolution of the immune system [7], [8], [36], [38], [73], with at least some suggestion that social species may have a reduced complement of immune - related genes.

«Tradeoffs between weaponry and fecundity in snapping shrimp queens vary with eusociality: Weakly eusocial queens must trade off their investment in maintaining their fighting claws or producing eggs.»

And a few are critical of the new mathematical model that Nowak et al. propose to explain eusociality.

If inclusive fitness is wrong, how do you explain «eusociality» — when individuals reduce their ability to have offspring of their own to raise the offspring of others?

A similar story held true for ants, whose evolutionary history with eusociality was also thought to be long, but only weakly supported by the fossil record.

Eusociality is thought to have appeared first in termites in the Late Jurassic, about 150 - 160 million years ago.

Writing in the 17 January issue of Science, the researchers say the new insights «could contribute greatly to our understanding of the evolution of eusociality» in insects.

(Among vertebrates, eusociality is found in just two species of African mole rats.)

Eusociality is characterised by cooperative brood care, overlapping adult generations and division of labour between fertile queens and sterile workers.

Advanced sociality, or eusociality, a hallmark of which is reproductive specialization into worker and queen castes, is essentially a phenomenon of the group of invertebrates known as arthropods.

A number of spectacular pieces of amber recently recovered from Myanmar gave Barden, Grimaldi, and their colleagues a clear answer: Eusociality was going strong in both groups during the Cretaceous.

People who are open - minded are beginning to realise that the results of our paper are beautiful: simple mathematical models based on standard natural selection are sufficient to explain the evolution of eusociality or other phenomena in social evolution.

Competing hypotheses based largely on research on terrestrial insect species, such as ants, bees, wasps and termites, suggest that eusociality and communal breeding are either alternative evolutionary endpoints, or that communal breeding is an intermediate stage in the transition from pair - forming to eusociality.

«First, there is no single road map to eusociality — the complex, cooperative social system in which animals behave more like superorganisms than individuals fending for themselves,» said Gene Robinson, a lead on the study who is a professor of entomology and director of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois.

In the past few years, however, he changed his mind, favoring an idea called group selection, which provides a mechanism for the evolution of eusociality that does not require individuals to be related to others» offspring.

He says he and his colleagues do not negate the importance of relatedness in the evolution of eusociality, as the critics say.

In the 1980s, Wilson himself was a strong proponent of this theory to explain the origins of eusociality — the type of very complex society seen in bees, ants, and termites.

«Relatedness is better explained as the consequence rather than the cause of eusociality,» they wrote.

Instead, he proposed that eusociality evolved because the benefits of group living, such as increased food and defense against predators, were strong enough to induce unrelated insects to band and breed together.

«It's an important paper because it provides the first real test for the role of relatedness in the origin of eusociality and its actual evolution,» says biologist Bernard Crespi of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada.