Wing polyphenism in ants, which produces a winged female queen caste and a wingless female worker caste, evolved approximately 150 million years ago and has been key to the remarkable success of ants. Approximately 20 million years ago, the myrmicine ant genus Cardiocondyla evolved an additional wing polyphenism among males producing two male morphs: wingless males that fight to enhance mating success and winged males that disperse. Here we show that interruption of rudimentary wing‐disc development in larvae of the ant
Cardiocondyla obscurior occurs further downstream in the network in wingless males as compared with wingless female workers. This pattern is corroborated in
C. kagutsuchi, a species from a different clade within the genus, indicating that late interruption of wing development in males is conserved across
Cardiocondyla. Therefore, our results show that the novel male wing polyphenism was not developmentally constrained by the pre‐existing female wing polyphenism and evolved through independent alteration of interruption points in the wing gene network. Furthermore, a comparison of adult morphological characters in
C. obscurior reveals that developmental trajectories lead to similar morphological trait integration between winged and wingless females, but dramatically different integration between winged and wingless males. This suggests that the alternative sex‐specific developmental routes to achieve winglessness in the genus
Cardiocondyla may have evolved through different selection regimes acting on wingless males and females.
Mother-son mating (oedipal mating) is practically non-existent in social Hymenoptera, as queens typically avoid inbreeding, mate only early in life and do not mate again after having begun to lay eggs. In the ant genus Cardiocondyla mating occurs among sib in the natal nests. Sex ratios are extremely female-biased and young queens face the risk of remaining without mating partners. Here, we show that virgin queens of Cardiocondyla argyrotricha produce sons from their own unfertilized eggs and later mate with them to produce female offspring from fertilized eggs. Oedipal mating may allow C. argyrotricha queens to found new colonies when no mating partners are available and thus maintains their unusual life history combining monogyny, mating in the nest, and low male production. Our result indicates that a trait that sporadically occurs in solitary haplodiploid animals may evolve also in social Hymenoptera under appropriate ecological and social conditions.
The genotypes of 48 barbary macaques were determined with respect to four diallelic systems: ABO blood groups, transferrin, soluble glutamic oxaloacetic transaminase, and pancreatic amylase. Paternity tests were performed for 32 offspring of 13 (14) females from an established breeding group which contained 3 sexually mature males.
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