It is argued in this paper that pheromonal queen control has never conclusively been demonstrated and is evolutionarily difficult to justify, and a series of experimental and field studies in which positive results would give prima facie evidence for phersomonalQueen control are suggested.
This model simulated patch use as a statedependent response to physiological state, travel cost, predation risk, prey densities, and fitness currencies other than net-rate maximization, and highlights the need to consider predator behavior, as well as specify the range of nutritional states likely in foraging animals.
Although skew indices have been applied mostly to shared reproduction, the B index is suitable to any situation where group members divide benefits, and potentially can identify and test evolutionary scenarios across a wide range of behavioral interactions.
Simple models are developed that predict that a greater availability of resources used for provisions will lead to an increase in the amount provisioned per offspring and an increased in the numerical or biomass proportion of females produced.
An analysis of a wide body of literature on ants strongly supports the genetic relatedness hypothesis (GRH), and the bimodal sexual investment pattern appears to be a mixed "evolutionary stable strategy and state" and seems proximately determined by the amount of food resources.
Cooperative behaviour among individuals within a group is often characterized by unequal sharing of the benefits resulting from the cooperation. The degree of this skew in benefits has been proposed…
The theory correctly predicts that the dominant's share of reproduction, i.e. the skew, increases as the colony cycle progresses and the skew is positively associated both with the colony's productivity and with the relatedness between dominant and subordinate.
It is proposed that queen number is an ecologically flexible trait that is influenced by a broad set of factors but is not necessarily linked to specific habitat types.
Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical…
1 May 2011
TLDR
Although reproductive skew theory fails to predict within‐group dynamics consistently, it does better at predicting quantitative differences in skew across populations or species, which suggests that kin selection can play a significant role in the evolution of sociality.
Many studies have shown that predation risk affects foraging behavior, but quantitative predictions are rare because of the lack of a common currency for energy intake and mortality. This problem is…