The environment that an offspring experiences during its development can have lifelong
consequences for its morphology, anatomy, physiology and behaviour that are strong …

Recently there has been an explosion of research into the genetics of caste determination,
especially following the discovery of systems where queen-worker caste determination has …

Recent decades have witnessed an explosion of theoretical and empirical studies of sex
allocation, transforming how we understand the allocation of resources to male and female …

We examined how dietary, social, and genetic factors affect individual size and caste in the
Florida harvester ant Pogonomyrmex badius, which has three discrete female castes. The …

Caste differentiation involves many functional traits that diverge during larval growth and
metamorphosis to produce adults irreversibly adapted to reproductive division of labor …

The study of sex allocation in social Hymenoptera (ants, bees, and wasps) provides an
excellent opportunity for testing kin-selection theory and studying conflict resolution. A …

Social insect queens and workers can engage in conflict over reproductive allocation when
they have different fitness optima. Here, we show that queens have control over queen …

Abstract Models based on the kin selection theory predict that in social hymenopterans,
queens may favor a lower investment in the production of sexuals than workers. However, in …

Insect societies are paramount examples of cooperation, yet they also harbor internal
conflicts whose resolution depends on the power of the opponents [1–4]. The male-haploid …

The castes of social insects can vary dramatically in physiology, morphology and behaviour,
and are a model of phenotypic plasticity. Dietary variation has been implicated in the …