The abstract of the article can be found at http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/03/01/rspb.2011.2639.abstract
-Elizabeth Richardson
Monday, April 2, 2012
Eusociality of termites
An article was very recently published called "Brood care and social evolution in termites." The full text of this article is still not yet available at Rice, but the study presents some intriguing findings. The evolutionary community has always assumed that cooperative brood care was a necessary component for eusociality and a driving force of social evolution. However, this study looked at four different species of termites and found that cooperative brood care was common in only one of them. It appears that the evolution of eusociality in termites may have actually been driven by increased defense!
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This is incredibly interesting. I mean, the fact that eusociality has even evolved separately in so many lineages is already pretty surprising considering it is a fairly complicated system. It will be really cool to see how exactly the evolution of eusociality in termites varies from that of species who's eusocial evolution was driven by brood care and how these differences have affected the way currently eusociality works with this two methods.
ReplyDelete-Cristina Terhoeve