TY - JOUR
T1 - Colony response to graded resource changes
T2 - An analytical model of the influence of genotype, environment, and dominance
AU - Bertram, Susan M.
AU - Gorelick, Root
AU - Fewell, Jennifer
N1 - Funding Information:
We gratefully acknowledge Robert Johnson and other members of the Social Insect Research Group (SIRG) at Arizona State University, Michael Lachmann of the Santa Fe Institute and the Max Plank Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, and an anonymous reviewer for providing comments on this manuscript. This work stems from discussions occurring in the Santa Fe Institute Working Group on Social Insects, and was partially funded by NIMH grant # R29 MH51329 to JHF, and NSF grant # IBN 0093410 to JHF and JF Harrison. This research complies with the current laws of the United States of America.
PY - 2003/9
Y1 - 2003/9
N2 - Successful social groups must respond dynamically to environmental changes. However, a flexible group response requires the coordination of many individuals. Here we offer a static analytical model that integrates variation in environment-based cues for performance of a task with genetically and environmentally based variation in individual responses, and predicts the resultant colony behavior for that task. We also provide formulae for computing effective number of alleles in a haplo-diploid colony founded by any number of parents. Variable colony resources combined with variation among worker phenotypes generate known patterns of colony flexibility, allowing us to explicitly test how the number of loci, dominance/codominance, and the phenotype's environment influences group response. Our model indicates that the number of loci strongly influences colony behavior. For one or two loci, the proportion of workers foraging for pollen remain constant over vast increases in colony pollen stores, but then drops dramatically when the pollen stores increase past a specific threshold. As the number of loci controlling pollen foraging increases, graded increases in pollen stores result in a graded drop in the proportion of the worker population foraging for pollen. The effect of number of alleles is less strong, a result we discuss in light of the fact that a low number of effective alleles are expected in a colony. Comparisons of our model with empirical honey bee (Apis mellifera) data indicate that worker foraging response to pollen stores is driven by one or two loci, each with dominant allelic effects. The growing body of evidence that genotype has strong effects on task performance in social insect colonies, and the variation in within-colony genetic diversity across social insect taxa, make our model broadly applicable in explaining social group coordination.
AB - Successful social groups must respond dynamically to environmental changes. However, a flexible group response requires the coordination of many individuals. Here we offer a static analytical model that integrates variation in environment-based cues for performance of a task with genetically and environmentally based variation in individual responses, and predicts the resultant colony behavior for that task. We also provide formulae for computing effective number of alleles in a haplo-diploid colony founded by any number of parents. Variable colony resources combined with variation among worker phenotypes generate known patterns of colony flexibility, allowing us to explicitly test how the number of loci, dominance/codominance, and the phenotype's environment influences group response. Our model indicates that the number of loci strongly influences colony behavior. For one or two loci, the proportion of workers foraging for pollen remain constant over vast increases in colony pollen stores, but then drops dramatically when the pollen stores increase past a specific threshold. As the number of loci controlling pollen foraging increases, graded increases in pollen stores result in a graded drop in the proportion of the worker population foraging for pollen. The effect of number of alleles is less strong, a result we discuss in light of the fact that a low number of effective alleles are expected in a colony. Comparisons of our model with empirical honey bee (Apis mellifera) data indicate that worker foraging response to pollen stores is driven by one or two loci, each with dominant allelic effects. The growing body of evidence that genotype has strong effects on task performance in social insect colonies, and the variation in within-colony genetic diversity across social insect taxa, make our model broadly applicable in explaining social group coordination.
KW - Effective number of alleles
KW - Genetic variation
KW - Social group organization
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U2 - 10.1016/S0040-5809(03)00064-9
DO - 10.1016/S0040-5809(03)00064-9
M3 - Article
C2 - 12948677
AN - SCOPUS:0348228143
SN - 0040-5809
VL - 64
SP - 151
EP - 162
JO - Theoretical Population Biology
JF - Theoretical Population Biology
IS - 2
ER -