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  4. Task-dependent influence of genetic architecture and mating frequency on division of labour in social insect societies
 
research article

Task-dependent influence of genetic architecture and mating frequency on division of labour in social insect societies

Tarapore, Danesh
•
Floreano, Dario  
•
Keller, Laurent
2010
Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology

Division of labour is one of the most prominent features of social insects. The efficient allocation of individuals to different tasks requires dynamic adjustment in response to environmental perturbations. Theoretical models suggest that the colony-level flexibility in responding to external changes and internal perturbation may depend on the within-colony genetic diversity, which is affected by the number of breeding individuals. However, these models have not considered the genetic architecture underlying the propensity of workers to perform the various tasks. Here, we investigated how both within-colony genetic variability (stemming from variation in the number of matings by queens) and the number of genes influencing the stimulus (threshold) for a given task at which workers begin to perform that task jointly influence task allocation efficiency. We used a numerical agent- based model to investigate the situation where workers had to perform either a regulatory task or a foraging task. One hundred generations of artificial selection in populations consisting of 500 colonies revealed that an increased number of matings always improved colony performance, whatever the number of loci encoding the thresholds of the regulatory and foraging tasks. However, the beneficial effect of additional matings was particularly important when the genetic architecture of queens comprised one or a few genes for the foraging task’s threshold. By contrast, a higher number of genes encoding the foraging task reduced colony performance with the detrimental effect being stronger when queens had mated with several males. Finally, the number of genes encoding the threshold for the regulatory task only had a minor effect on colony performance. Overall, our numerical experiments support the importance of mating frequency on efficiency of division of labour and also reveal complex interactions between the number of matings and genetic architecture.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1007/s00265-009-0885-4
Web of Science ID

WOS:000274433600019

Author(s)
Tarapore, Danesh
Floreano, Dario  
Keller, Laurent
Date Issued

2010

Publisher

Springer Verlag

Published in
Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
Volume

64

Start page

675

End page

684

Subjects

Task Allocation

•

Response Thresholds

•

Number of Matings

•

Number of Loci

•

Genetic Diversity

•

Evolutionary Robotics

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LIS  
Available on Infoscience
December 10, 2009
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/44815
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