Preprints galore!

Hold onto your hats because the social fluids lab members have been preprinting like wild!

In September we had Marie-Pierre Meurville ’s Macroevolution preprint: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.09.25.509371

and Haruna Fujioka’s pseudotrophallaxis preprint: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.09.13.507744

and then in December we had Arthur Matte’s dimorphism preprint: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.12.08.519655

and finally in early 2023 we had Matteo Negroni’s metabolic division of labour preprint: https://doi.org/10.32942/X26C7X

Glad to share these with you all!

Adria LeBoeuf
Socially transferred materials: why and how to study them

TREE review about socially transferred materials!

About a year after preprinting this exciting paper is finally out.

I have had this idea for nearly as long as I have been studying trophallaxis. Each time I look at a protein list of a social transfer I see certain genes popping up again and again. These commonalities haunted me – I felt like all of these social exchanges had so much in common. This had to be a new field of research!

In 2020 I acquired funding for a small CUSO workshop on Social transfers. With this I could assemble an excellent group of co-authors who are outstanding scientists and who are invested in this topic. Through highly fruitful and dynamic discussions that I led, we came to the ideas we put forth in this review.

I think this perspective will change the way people approach major aspects of biology. When we set out to write this, the idea was to define a field. Only time will tell if we managed!

Adria LeBoeuf
Trophallaxis: the functions and evolution of social fluid exchange in ant colonies (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

Marie-Pierre and Adria wrote this giant review about trophallaxis, in what contexts it occurs, who does it and the big ‘why,’ why did it evolve. Please enjoy it, complete with the lovely figures (thanks Emile)!

There’s a lovely blog post interview with Marie-Pierre about the paper that Myrmecological News did.

Along with the paper we also put out a database that we’ll update about which species do and don’t engage in trophallaxis. Please write to us if you have any species to contribute!

Meurville_LeBoeuf-Fig2_withoutU.jpg



Adria LeBoeuf