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Additional file 2. Coordinates of nests where ants and silverfish were collected for chemical analyses.

Additional file 1. Phylogeny based on morphological traits of the studied species.

Swarm robotics has both an engineering as well as a scientific nature. On the one hand, it studies how to design flexible, robust, and scalable collective behaviors to solve real-world problems in large, unstructured environments. On the other hand, it is also useful to biologists to study the proximate mechanisms employed by social species to achieve the astonishing levels of collective organization that are often observed in nature. Evolutionary swarm robotics has a similar double nature. On the one hand, the use of evolutionary computation techniques is proposed as a solution to the design problem, that is, to decompose the collective-level goal into the local behaviors of the robots. On the other hand, studying evolutionary robotics scenarios can be very useful to biologists to understand the ultimate causes and factors that promote the evolution of specific types of collective organization in nature. In this paper, our goal is to use an evolutionary swarm robotics scenario to answer questions related to the evolution of recruitment strategies in social insects. We consider a foraging scenario in which objects are distributed in the environment according to specific distributions. We show that the way food is distributed in the environment has a significant influence on whether and which recruitment strategies emerge through the evolutionary process. The results of this paper are therefore useful both to advance our understanding on the evolutionary causes of recruitment in biological systems, as well as to hint to engineers the requirements to evolve complex coordination strategies. ispartof: pages:1-8 ispartof: Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Swarm Behavior and Bio-Inspired Robotics pages:1-8 ispartof: First International Symposium on Swarm Behavior and Bio-Inspired Robotics (SWARM 2015) location:Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan date:28 Oct - 30 Oct 2015 status: published

Aphids are a worldwide pest and an important model in ecology and evolution. Little is known, however, about the genetic structure of their colonies at a microgeographic level. For example, it remains largely unknown whether most species form monoclonal or polyclonal colonies. Here, we present the first detailed study on levels of clonal mixing in a nonsocial facultative ant mutualist, the black bean aphid Aphis fabae. In contrast to the earlier suggestion that colonies of this species are generally monoclonal, we found that across two subspecies of the black bean aphid, A. fabae cirsiiacanthoidis and A. fabae fabae, 32% and 67% of the aphid colonies were in fact polyclonal, consisting of a mix of up to four different clones, which resulted in an overall average relatedness within colonies of 0.90 and 0.79 in the two subspecies. Data further show that the average relatedness in A. f. cirsiiacanthoidis remained relatively constant throughout the season, which means that clonal erosion due to clonal selection more or less balanced with the influx of new clones from elsewhere. Nevertheless, relatedness tended to decrease over the lifetime of a given colony, implying that clonal mixing primarily resulted from the joining of pre-existing colonies as opposed to via simultaneous host colonisation by several foundresses. Widespread clonal mixing is argued to affect the ecology and evolution of the aphids in various important ways, for example with respect to the costs and benefits of group living, the evolution of dispersal and the interaction with predators as well as with the ant mutualists. ispartof: Molecular Ecology vol:20 issue:22 pages:4772-4785 ispartof: location:England status: published

The struggle among social classes or castes is well known in humans. Here, we show that caste inequality similarly affects societies of ants, bees and wasps, where castes are morphologically distinct and workers have greatly reduced reproductive potential compared with queens. In social insects, an individual normally has no control over its own fate, whether queen or worker, as this is socially determined during rearing. Here, for the first time, we quantify a strategy for overcoming social control. In the stingless bee Schwarziana quadripunctata, some individuals reared in worker cells avoid a worker fate by developing into fully functional dwarf queens. \ud \ud

In human society selfish use of common resources\ud can lead to disaster, a situation known as the ‘tragedy\ud of the commons’ (TOC). Although a TOC is\ud usually prevented by coercion, theory predicts that\ud close kinship ties can also favour reduced exploitation.\ud We test this prediction using data on a TOC\ud occurring in Melipona bee societies.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) enables in vivo imaging of organisms. The recent development of the magnetic resonance microscope (MRM) has enabled organisms within the size range of many insects to be imaged. Here, we introduce the principles of MRI and MRM and review their use in entomology. We show that MRM has been successfully applied in studies of parasitology, development, metabolism, biomagnetism and morphology, and the advantages and disadvantages relative to other imaging techniques are discussed. In addition, we illustrate the images that can be obtained using MRM. We conclude that although MRM has significant potential, further improvements to the technique are still desirable if it is to become a mainstream imaging technology in entomology. Abbreviation: CSI chemical shift imaging. The dependence of the resonance frequency of a nucleus on the chemical binding of the atom or molecule in which it is contained. (N)MRI (nuclear) magnetic resonance imaging MRM magnetic resonance microscopy Voxel A contraction for volume element, which is the basic unit of MR reconstruction; represented as a pixel in the display of the MR image.