| a diapause pathway underlies the gyne phenotype in polistes wasps, revealing an evolutionary route to caste-containing insect societies. | colonies of social wasps, ants, and bees are characterized by the production of two phenotypes of female offspring, workers that remain at their natal nest and nonworkers that are potential colony reproductives of the next generation. the phenotype difference includes morphology and is fixed during larval development in ants, honey bees, and some social wasps, all of which represent an advanced state of sociality. paper wasps (polistes) lack morphological castes and are thought to more closely r ... | 2007 | 17704258 |
| differential gene expression and protein abundance evince ontogenetic bias toward castes in a primitively eusocial wasp. | polistes paper wasps are models for understanding conditions that may have characterized the origin of worker and queen castes and, therefore, the origin of paper wasp sociality. polistes is "primitively eusocial" by virtue of having context-dependent caste determination and no morphological differences between castes. even so, polistes colonies have a temporal pattern in which most female larvae reared by the foundress become workers, and most reared by workers become future-reproductive gynes. ... | 2010 | 20498859 |
| molecular heterochrony and the evolution of sociality in bumblebees (bombus terrestris). | sibling care is a hallmark of social insects, but its evolution remains challenging to explain at the molecular level. the hypothesis that sibling care evolved from ancestral maternal care in primitively eusocial insects has been elaborated to involve heterochronic changes in gene expression. this elaboration leads to the prediction that workers in these species will show patterns of gene expression more similar to foundress queens, who express maternal care behaviour, than to established queens ... | 2014 | 24552837 |
| nutrition and division of labor: effects on foraging and brain gene expression in the paper wasp polistes metricus. | deeply conserved molecular mechanisms regulate food-searching behaviour in response to nutritional cues in a wide variety of vertebrates and invertebrates. studies of the highly eusocial honey bee have shown that nutritional physiology and some conserved nutrient signalling pathways, especially the insulin pathway, also regulate the division of labour between foraging and non-foraging individuals. typically, lean workers leave the nest to forage for food, and well-nourished workers perform tasks ... | 2011 | 22066722 |
| brain transcriptomic analysis in paper wasps identifies genes associated with behaviour across social insect lineages. | comparative sociogenomics has the potential to provide important insights into how social behaviour evolved. we examined brain gene expression profiles of the primitively eusocial wasp polistes metricus and compared the results with a growing base of brain gene expression information for the advanced eusocial honeybee, apis mellifera. we studied four female wasp groups that show variation in foraging/provisioning behaviour and reproductive status, using our newly developed microarray representin ... | 2010 | 20236980 |
| wasp gene expression supports an evolutionary link between maternal behavior and eusociality. | the presence of workers that forgo reproduction and care for their siblings is a defining feature of eusociality and a major challenge for evolutionary theory. it has been proposed that worker behavior evolved from maternal care behavior. we explored this idea by studying gene expression in the primitively eusocial wasp polistes metricus. because little genomic information existed for this species, we used 454 sequencing to generate 391,157 brain complementary dna reads, resulting in robust hits ... | 2007 | 17901299 |