Unruly larvae: how social transfers drove social complexity in ants

Arthur’s paper finally published!

This was a real thrill to do. Arthur set out on his master’s internship to catalogue queen:worker dimorphism based on antweb/antcat photos. Then we started trying to link up these patterns to trophallaxis and other traits, but something was missing. It was clear that dimorphism had to be built in the larvae, but there are so few data on how ant larvae are fed! What to do? Arthur came up with a great idea, to use the work of Wheeler and Wheeler to classify larvae according to active and passive features. This quantitative assessment of larval passiveness allowed us to push the study of dimorphism beyond the classic but non-mechanistic hypotheses around colony size and social complexity into the more mechanistic realm of socially transferred materials.

We thank PNAS and especially Tim Linksvayer putting together the news and views piece!