Summary of article

Question

Hi, can anyone tell me what this article is talking about? I find it hard to understand.

Conditional Manipulation of Sex Ratios by Ant Workers: A Test of Kin Selection Theory

doi: 10.1126/science.274.5289.993.

Thank you

Answer 1

Hi Tom K.,

Sounds like you are trying to make head-or-tail out of the article as is. That's not always the best strategy, and if you had a sister, i'm sure she would let you know that. Here's why:

In eusocial Hymenoptera (that is to say, ants), there is some specific genetic structure at work. Because of how the genes there work, the workers in the hive (non-fertile females) are MORE CLOSELY RELATED to each other than they are to the males in the hive.

It's a cardinal rule of genetics that, other things being equal, you try to reproduce (pass on) your DNA. Your DNA would definitely like to be passed on, that's why you have it!

However, the workers in the hive can't pass on their own DNA per se, because they aren't fertile. The best they can do is, try to make more fertile female ants who do share their DNA. And those would be queens, resulting from specialized treatment of their own queen's eggs.

So, they have a stake in trying to make more of their queen's eggs develop as fertile queens. But that queen has a contrary stake: trying to keep ratios of new queens low (except to permit swarming), lay more sterile worker eggss, and some males.

So the workers in the hive have a different bias in their egg treatment than the queen does. All this is termed "Kin Selection".

If you want to take it further, I'd suggest you scan the summaries of related articles, at least; Google makes this easy for you, finding them and suggesting them. Scan a lot, read a few, and you will soon know exactly what the article is proposing (and, perhaps, what some opposing points of view are).

-- Cheers, --Mr. d.