Abstract
In many colonies of social insects, the workers compete with each other and with the queen over the production of the colony’s males. In some species of social bees and wasps with annual societies, this intra-colony conflict even results in matricide—the killing of the colony’s irreplaceable queen by a daughter worker. In colonies with low effective paternity and high worker-worker relatedness, workers value worker-laid males more than queen-laid males, and thus may benefit from queen killing. Workers gain by eliminating the queen because she is a competing source of male eggs and actively inhibits worker reproduction through policing. However, matricide may be costly to workers if it reduces the production of valuable new queens and workers. Here, I test a theoretical prediction regarding the timing of matricide in a wasp, Dolichovespula arenaria, recently shown to have facultative matricide based on intra-colony relatedness. Using analyses of collected, mature colonies and a surgical manipulation preventing queens from laying female eggs, I show that workers do not preferentially kill queens who are only producing male eggs. Instead, workers sometimes kill queens laying valuable females, suggesting a high cost of matricide. Although matricide is common and typically occurs only in low-paternity colonies, it seems that workers sometimes pay substantial costs in this expression of conflict over male parentage.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Tom Seeley, Cole Gilbert, and Kern Reeve, as well as Paul Sherman and the NBB Lunch Bunch, for discussion and feedback. Without Cole Gilbert’s training and advice, the surgical manipulations would have been impossible. Madhusree Choudhury, Luke DeFisher, and Chun Chien helped with fieldwork and lab work. Julian Kapoor and Steve Bogdanowicz advised on microsatellite analyses. Jessica Purcell and two anonymous reviewers gave helpful comments on a version of manuscript. Francis Ratnieks kindly provided unpublished data on D. arenaria. The residents of Tompkins Co., NY generously responded to ads for wasp colonies. This work was funded by a US National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (DGE-1144153) and a US-NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (1210645).
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Loope, K.J. Matricide and queen sex allocation in a yellowjacket wasp. Sci Nat 103, 57 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-016-1384-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-016-1384-x