Search

Cooperative breeding decreases the direct reproductive output of subordinate individuals, but cooperation can be evolutionarily favored when there are challenges or constraints to breeding independently. Environmental factors, including temperature, precipitation, latitude, high seasonality, and environmental harshness have been hypothesized to correlate with the presence of cooperative breeding. However, to test the relationship between cooperation and ecological constraints requires comparative data on the frequency and variation of cooperative breeding across differing environments, ideally replicated across multiple species. Paper wasps are primitively social species, forming colonies composed of reproductively active dominants and foraging subordinates. Adult female wasps, referred to as foundresses, initiate new colonies. Nests can be formed by a single solitary foundress (noncooperative) or by multiple foundress associations (cooperative). Cooperative behavior varies within and among species, making paper wasps species well suited to disentangling ecological correlates of variation in cooperative behavior. This data set reports the frequency and extent of cooperative nest founding for 87 paper wasp species. Data were assembled from more than 170 published sources, previously unpublished field observations, and photographs contributed by citizen scientists to online natural history repositories. The data set includes 25,872 nest observations and reports the cooperative behavioral decisions for 45,297 foundresses. Species names were updated to reflect modern taxonomic revisions. The type of substrate on which the nest was built is also included, when available. A smaller population-level version of this data set found that the presence or absence of cooperative nesting in paper wasps was correlated with temperature stability and environmental harshness, but these variables did not predict the extent of cooperation within species. This expanded data set contains details about individual nests and further increases the power to address the relationship between the environment and the presence and extent of cooperative breeding. Beyond the ecological drivers of cooperation, these high-resolution data will be useful for future studies examining the evolutionary consequences of variation in social behavior. This data set may be used for research or educational purposes provided that this data paper is cited.

Globally, biodiversity is declining because of anthropogenic pressures, and this could lead to extinction of some species before they are discovered. The loss of insect taxa is of prime concern, given recent reports of significant declines in the populations of many taxa across the globe. Efforts to document biodiversity have met with several challenges, amongst which are the difficulties in using morphological features to discriminate species, especially in insects. DNA barcoding is a rapid and reliable method for species identification and discovery but choosing appropriate primers to amplify the barcode region without co-amplifying contaminants remains a key challenge. We developed and tested a set of primers for PCR amplification of the DNA barcode region of the COI gene in polistine wasps. We tested their efficacy in 36 species of vespid wasps, and the solitary wasp Zethus miniatus Saussure. Samples were obtained from Africa, Americas, Asia, and Europe. The polistine-specific primers successfully amplified the barcode region for all polistines tested, without amplifying any Wolbachia present; they also worked with many species from the other Vespidae wasp subfamilies. The new primers are valuable for the discovery and accurate documentation of polistine wasps in the four continents. Key words: COI gene, DNA barcoding, social wasps, Vespidae. ?€l'échelle mondiale, la biodiversité est en déclin en raison de pressions anthropogéniques et ceci pourrait entraîner l'extinction de certaines espèces avant même qu'elles n'aient été découvertes. La perte de taxons d'insectes est une préoccupation importante au vu de récents rapports faisant état de déclins significatifs des populations chez plusieurs taxons dans le monde. Des efforts visant à documenter la biodiversité se sont butés à plusieurs obstacles dont la difficulté à distinguer les espèces sur la base de critères morphologiques, particulièrement chez les insectes. Le codage à barres de l'ADN est une méthode rapide et fiable pour identifier les espèces, mais la sélection d'amorces appropriées permettant d'amplifier les régions code à barres sans co-amplification de contaminants demeure un défi. Les auteurs ont développé et testé un jeu d'amorces pour l'amplification PCR d'unerégion codeà barre au sein du gèneCOI chez lesguêpesdela sous-famille des Polistinae. Les auteurs en ont testé l'efficacité chez 36 espèces de guêpes de la famille des Vespidae ainsi que chez la guêpe solitaire Zethus miniatus Saussure. Des échantillons ont été obtenus de l'Afrique, des Amériques, de l'Asie et de l'Europe. Les amorces spécifiques des Polistinae ont amplifié avec succès la région code à barre chez toutes les Polistinae testées, sans amplifier aucunes des espèces de Wolbachia présentes. Elles ont également bien fonctionné chez plusieurs espèces de guêpes appartenant à d'autres sous-familles au sein des Vespidae. Ces nouvelles amorces seront utiles pour la découverte et la bonne documentation des guêpes de la sous-famille des Polistinae sur les quatre continents. [Traduit par la Rédaction] Mots-clés: gène COI, codage à barres de l'ADN, guêpes sociales, Vespidae., Introduction Human activities such as intensification of agriculture, industrialization and urbanization, habitat loss, increased spread of invasive species, pollution, and climate change have caused an increased rate of biodiversity loss [...]

Set up in 2011 in the UK, Soapbox Science is reaching across the globe, highlighting women in science and the research they carry out in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Events turn busy city centres into places of discussion, debate and demonstrations. Soapbox Science brings the science directly to the public, breaking down barriers to enable researchers to discuss their research with anyone and bring everyone a step closer to the latest discoveries that are changing our understanding of the world.

Social insect reproductives and non‐reproductives represent ideal models with which to understand the expression and regulation of alternative phenotypes. Most research in this area has focused on the developmental regulation of reproductive phenotypes in obligately social taxa such as honey bees, while relatively few studies have addressed the molecular correlates of reproductive differentiation in species in which the division of reproductive labour is established only in plastic dominance hierarchies. To address this knowledge gap, we generate the first genome for any stenogastrine wasp and analyse brain transcriptomic data for non‐reproductives and reproductives of the facultatively social species Liostenogaster flavolineata, a representative of one of the simplest forms of social living. By experimentally manipulating the reproductive 'queues' exhibited by social colonies of this species, we show that reproductive division of labour in this species is associated with transcriptomic signatures that are more subtle and variable than those observed in social taxa in which colony living has become obligate; that variation in gene expression among non‐reproductives reflects their investment into foraging effort more than their social rank; and that genes associated with reproductive division of labour overlap to some extent with those underlying division of labour in the separate polistine origin of wasp sociality but only explain a small portion of overall variation in this trait. These results indicate that broad patterns of within‐colony transcriptomic differentiation in this species are similar to those in Polistinae but offer little support for the existence of a strongly conserved 'toolkit' for sociality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of eusociality requires that individuals forgo some or all their own reproduction to assist the reproduction of others in their group, such as a primary egg-laying queen. A major open question is how genes and genetic pathways sculpt the evolution of eusociality, especially in rudimentary forms of sociality—those with smaller cooperative nests when compared with species such as honeybees that possess large societies. We lack comprehensive comparative studies examining shared patterns and processes across multiple social lineages. Here we examine the mechanisms of molecular convergence across two lineages of bees and wasps exhibiting such rudimentary societies. These societies consist of few individuals and their life histories range from facultative to obligately social. Using six species across four independent origins of sociality, we conduct a comparative meta-analysis of publicly available transcriptomes. Standard methods detected little similarity in patterns of differential gene expression in brain transcriptomes among reproductive and non-reproductive individuals across species. By contrast, both supervised machine learning and consensus co-expression network approaches uncovered sets of genes with conserved expression patterns among reproductive and non-reproductive phenotypes across species. These sets overlap substantially, and may comprise a shared genetic "toolkit" for sociality across the distantly related taxa of bees and wasps and independently evolved lineages of sociality. We also found many lineage-specific genes and co-expression modules associated with social phenotypes and possible signatures of shared life-history traits. These results reveal how taxon-specific molecular mechanisms complement a core toolkit of molecular processes in sculpting traits related to the evolution of eusociality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Author(s): Patrick Kennedy (corresponding author) [1]; Andrew D. Higginson [2]; Andrew N. Radford [1]; Seirian Sumner [3] The evolution of altruismcostly self-sacrifice in the service of othershas puzzled biologists [1] [...]