“…In this species, colony fragmentation stimulates the development of the winged male morph (Cremer & Heinze, ; Du, Schrempf, & Heinze, ; Schrader, Simola, Heinze, & Oettler, ; Schrempf & Heinze, ), but the precise environmental cues that induce winged or wingless males are not yet fully understood. Wingless males have been shown to play a prominent role in all aspects of the colony life cycle—not only are they at the core of competition over sex allocation under local mate competition (Cremer & Heinze, ) or reproductive dominance (Suefuji, Cremer, Oettler, & Heinze, ), they also have direct effects on queen fitness (Schrempf et al, ; Von Wyschetzki, Rueppell, Oettler & Heinze, ).…”