Queen,worker, and male yellowjacket wasps receive different nutrition during development |
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Authors: | K C?Schmidt B?G?Hunt Email author" target="_blank">C?R?SmithEmail author |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Biology, Earlham College, 801 National Road West, Richmond, IN, 47374, U.S.A;(2) School of Biology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332, U.S.A; |
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Abstract: | Nutritional variation among developing larvae is a long-standing hypothesis for how a sterile caste could evolve, with larvae
deprived of nutrition becoming sterile or not leaving the nest. In this study, we test whether the three castes of the eusocial
yellowjacket wasp (Vespula maculifrons) differ in the trophic source of their larval diet, their overall carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) content, as well as the distribution
of C and N across body parts. Virgin queens (gynes) assimilated food from a higher relative trophic level compared to males,
and workers were the lowest. Gynes, due to their much greater mass compared to the other castes are much more costly in terms
of N, but males have the lowest C:N ratio. The variation in C:N is likely due to differences in life history between males
and females (gynes and workers), where females invest more in energy storage (e.g., lipids) compared to males which have very
short life spans; the major difference is in the abdomen, where fat is stored. The results of this study complement similar
results in ants, which evolved a reproductive division of labor independently, and which diverged from vespid wasps near 150
million years ago. Similarities between how wasp and ant caste determination occurs suggest either a conserved mechanism that
predates the evolution of eusociality or convergence on the same mechanism for generating alternative phenotypes. Provisioning
N-expensive castes with food from a higher trophic level likely increases efficiency of N delivery because of N-enrichment
with increasing trophic level. |
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