Intergenerational effect of juvenile hormone on offspring in <Emphasis Type="Italic">Pogonomyrmex</Emphasis> harvester ants |
| |
Authors: | Sara Helms Cahan Christopher J Graves Colin S Brent |
| |
Institution: | (1) Department of Biology, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405, USA;(2) US Department of Agriculture, Arid-Land Agricultural Research Center, Maricopa, AZ 85138, USA |
| |
Abstract: | Parents can influence the phenotypes of their offspring via a number of mechanisms. In harvester ants, whether female progeny
develop into workers or daughter queens is strongly influenced by the age and temperature conditions experienced by their
mother, which is associated with variation in maternal ecdysteroid deposition in fertilized eggs. In many insects, juvenile
hormone (JH) is antagonistic to ecdysteroid release, suggesting that seasonal and age-based variation in maternal JH titers
may explain maternal effects on offspring size and reproductive caste. To test this hypothesis, we artificially increased
maternal JH titers with methoprene, a JH analog, in laboratory colonies of two Pogonomyrmex populations exhibiting genetic caste determination. Increasing maternal JH resulted in a 50% increase in worker body size,
as well as a sharp reduction in total number of progeny reared, but did not alter the genotype of progeny reared to adulthood.
The intergenerational effect of JH manipulation was not mediated by a reduction in ecdysteroid deposition into eggs; instead,
changes in egg size, trophic egg availability or brood/worker ratio may have altered the nutritional environment of developing
larvae. Egg ecdysteroid content was significantly negatively correlated with natural variation in worker body size, however,
suggesting that there are multiple independent routes by which queens can modify offspring phenotypes. |
| |
Keywords: | |
本文献已被 PubMed SpringerLink 等数据库收录! |
|