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Mechanism of facultative parthenogenesis in the ant Platythyrea punctata

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Abstract

Thelytokous parthenogenesis, the production of diploid female offspring from unfertilized eggs, can be caused by several cytological mechanisms, which have a different impact on the genetic variation on the offspring. The ponerine ant Platythyrea punctata is widely distributed throughout the Caribbean Islands and Central America and exhibits facultative parthenogenesis. Workers in many field colonies from the Caribbean Islands have identical multilocus genotypes and are thus probably clonal, but the occurrence of males makes an ameiotic mechanism of thelytoky unlikely. To clarify the details of thelytoky in this species we compared the multilocus genotypes of mothers and their offspring in experimental colonies and analyzed the genotypes of haploid and diploid males. Additionally, we screened a large number of field colonies from thelytokous populations for the occurrence of recombination events. According to these data, automixis with central fusion and a reduced recombination rate is the most likely mechanism of thelytoky, as in the Cape honeybee and the ant Cataglyphis cursor.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Jon N. Seal and two anonymous referees for critical comments on the manuscript. Jon N. Seal, Jan Oettler, Bartosz Walter, Christiane Wanke, Benjamin Barth and Simon Tragust kindly assisted ant collecting in the field. We acknowledge the following individuals and institutions for facilitating the necessary collection and export permits: Miguel A. García, Departamento de Recursos Naturales y Ambientes, Puerto Rico; Amarilis Polonia, Dirección General de Vida Silvestre y Biodiversidad, Dominican Republic; James Arlington, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Dominica; Ian Gibbs, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Barbados; Dr Bowen Louison, Ministry of Agriculture, Grenada; Tamica Rahming, Bahamas National Trust; Wilber Sabido, Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment, and the Belize Audubon Society; Ernest Cowan, Florida Department of Environmental Protection, and the staff at John Pennekamp, Coral Reef State Park and Curry Hammock State Park; Donna Berry at the Nature Conservancy’s Southmost Preserve, and Jimmy Paz at the Texas Audubon Society at the Sabal Palm Grove; Lucia Orantes and Jorge Ivan Restrepo Zamorano Center of Biodiversity, Pan-American School of Agriculture, Honduras. This project is supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, He 1623/20).

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  1. Katrin Kellner

    Present address: Section of Integrative Biology, University of Texas, Austin, TX, 78712, USA

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  1. Biologie I, University of Regensburg, Universitätsstraße 31, 93040, Regensburg, Germany

    Katrin Kellner & Jürgen Heinze

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  1. Katrin Kellner
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  2. Jürgen Heinze
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Correspondence to Katrin Kellner.

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Kellner, K., Heinze, J. Mechanism of facultative parthenogenesis in the ant Platythyrea punctata . Evol Ecol 25, 77–89 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10682-010-9382-5

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