Liselotte Sundstrom

..Posthumously expressed male genes are thus able to oppose the reproductive interests of the genes expressed in queens and the latter apparently lack mechanisms for enforcing full control over sperm mixing and sperm allocation...

..e. the ability to perceive signals and the opportunity to act upon this information), and to address selection for selfishness at the individual level with costs of social disruption at the colony level...

..More generally, this study also highlights the importance of identifying the relevant scale in analyses of population structure and dispersal...

..We suggest the effects are caused by the inbred workers being less proficient in feeding the growing larvae. This represents a new kind of social inbreeding depression that may affect sex ratios as well as caste fate in social insects...

..We discuss potential mechanisms underlying eider communal brood-rearing decisions, which may be driven by the specific ecological conditions under which sociality has evolved in this species...

..Our results suggest that worker reproduction in F. fusca is ultimately an interplay of conflicts over male parentage and sex allocation and that both worker and self policing have roles as proximate mechanisms of resolution...

..Furthermore, new queens were mainly recruited from their natal or a neighbouring related colony. Finally, the effective number of queens coincided with that found upon excavation, suggesting low reproductive skew...

..These results imply that differences between social types may appear and persist also in sympatry, and that these differences may occur in some traits, but not others, despite the presence of homogenizing gene flow...

..We conclude that careful quantification of the costs of worker reproduction and policing is essential for inferences about the tragedy of the commons...

..Our results also have repercussions for genetic population analyses. Given the observed pattern of reproductive partitioning, estimates of effective population size based on worker and gyne samples are not interchangeable...

..This suggests that colonies with multiple matri- or patrilines also have a significantly greater chemical diversity...

..Overall, these results indicate that inbreeding depression may have important effects on colony fitness by affecting both the parental (queen) and offspring (worker)generations cohabiting within an ant colony...

..Hence, we conclude that Wolbachia does not seem to alter the sex ratio of its hosts as a means to increase transmission rate in these two populations of ants...

..This indicates that recognition entails environmental and genetic components, which allow both discrimination of kin in the absence of prior contact and learning of recognition cues based on group membership...