In: Insectes Sociaux, 2008, vol. 55, no. 4, p. 347-354
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In: Evolution, 2011, vol. 65, no. 7, p. 2026–2037
In social animals, inbreeding depression may manifest by compromising care or resources individuals receive from inbred group members. We studied the effects of worker inbreeding on colony productivity and investment in the ant Formica exsecta. The production of biomass decreased with increasing inbreeding, as did biomass produced per worker. Inbred colonies produced fewer gynes (unmated...
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In: Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 2009, vol. 22, no. 1, p. 134 - 142
To date very few studies have addressed the effects of inbreeding in social Hymenoptera, perhaps because the costs of inbreeding are generally considered marginal owing to male haploidy whereby recessive deleterious alleles are strongly exposed to selection in males. Here, we present one of the first studies on the effects of queen and worker homozygosity on colony performance. In a wild...
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In: Insectes Sociaux, 2008, vol. 55, no. 4, p. 347-354
Factors affecting relatedness among nest members in ant colonies with high queen number are still poorly understood. In order to identify the major determinants of nest kin structure, we conducted a detailed analysis of the breeding system of the ant Formica exsecta. We estimated the number of mature queens by mark-release-recapture in 29 nests and dissected a sub-sample of queens to assess their...
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