Affiliation:
1. College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, South Australia 5001, Australia
Abstract
To understand the earliest stages of social evolution, we need to identify species that are undergoing the initial steps into sociality.
Amphylaeus morosus
is the only unambiguously known social species in the bee family Colletidae and represents an independent origin of sociality within the Apoidea. This allows us to investigate the selective factors promoting the transition from solitary to social nesting. Using genome-wide SNP genotyping, we infer robust pedigree relationships to identify maternity of brood and intracolony relatedness for colonies at the end of the reproductive season. We show that
A. morosus
forms both matrifilial and full-sibling colonies, both involving complete or almost complete monopolization over reproduction. In social colonies, the reproductive primary was also the primary forager with the secondary female remaining in the nest, presumably as a guard. Social nesting provided significant protection against parasitism and increased brood survivorship in general. We show that secondary females gain large indirect fitness benefits from defensive outcomes, enough to satisfy the conditions of inclusive fitness theory, despite an over-production of males in social colonies. These results suggest an avenue to sociality that involves high relatedness and, very surprisingly, extreme reproductive skew in its earliest stages and raises important questions about the evolutionary steps in pathways to eusociality.
Funder
Holsworth Wildlife Research Endowment
Subject
General Agricultural and Biological Sciences,General Environmental Science,General Immunology and Microbiology,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Medicine
Cited by
3 articles.
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