Trophallaxis and ant evolution: Social fluids drove diversification
Marie-Pierre’s paper was finally published!
Super proud of this work that began as some conversations over coffee with Daniele Silvestro outside our link annex off the Biology Department in Fribourg. This was the lab’s first foray into comparative phylogenetic methods and we are hooked. Such an incredible set of tools for this era and for the incredible diversity of ants.
To me (Adria) the main take-aways of this paper are that:
Evolution of trophallaxis increased net diversification. Checked by two methods, consistent. This basically means once you gain trophallaxis, more speciations and extinctions.
Reproductive conflict needs to be somewhat resolved for ants to be wiling to share between adults. I think this is really exciting. It also led us down several rabbit holes. Depending on priors and parameters of ASRs we can get different results about the reproductive potential of workers in the ancestors of all ants, despite the huge bias against the possibility of worker totipotency. From the perspective of major evolutionary transitions in individuality, reduction in reproductive potential should be a one-way street. Together, these lead to the exciting possibility that not all ants are superorganisms.
Trophallaxis evolution in ants is a great system to study the evolution of a social transfer and its repercussions!
