Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Diploid Males And Their Triploid Offspring In The Paper Wasp Polistes Dominulus, Aviva Liebert, Annagiri Sumana, Philip Starks
Diploid Males And Their Triploid Offspring In The Paper Wasp Polistes Dominulus, Aviva Liebert, Annagiri Sumana, Philip Starks
Aviva E Liebert
Although the hymenopteran sex-determining mechanism generally results in haploid males and diploid females, diploid males can be produced via homozygosity at the sex-determining locus. Diploid males have low fitness because they are effectively sterile or produce presumably sterile triploid offspring. Previously, triploid females were observed in three species of North American Polistes paper wasps, and this was interpreted as indirect evidence of diploid males. Here we report what is, to our knowledge, the first direct evidence: four of five early male-producing Polistes dominulus nests from three populations contained diploid males. Because haploid males were also found, however, the adaptive value …
Transactional Skew And Assured Fitness Return Models Fail To Predict Patterns Of Cooperation In Wasps, Peter Nonacs, Aviva Liebert, Philip Starks
Transactional Skew And Assured Fitness Return Models Fail To Predict Patterns Of Cooperation In Wasps, Peter Nonacs, Aviva Liebert, Philip Starks
Aviva E Liebert
Cooperative breeders often exhibit reproductive skew, where dominant individuals reproduce more than subordinates. Two approaches derived from Hamilton’s inclusive fitness model predict when subordinate behavior is favored over living solitarily. The assured fitness return (AFR) model predicts that subordinates help when they are highly likely to gain immediate indirect fitness. Transactional skew models predict dominants and subordinates “agree” on a level of reproductive skew that induces subordinates to join groups. We show the AFR model to be a special case of transactional skew models that assumes no direct reproduction by subordinates. We use data from 11 populations of four wasp …