Unrelated Helpers in a Primitively Eusocial Wasp: Is Helping Tailored Towards Direct Fitness?

Ellouise Leadbeater, Jonathan M Carruthers, Jonathan P Green, Jasper van Heusden and Jeremy Field

PLOS ONE, 2010, vol. 5, issue 8, 1-7

Abstract: The paper wasp Polistes dominulus is unique among the social insects in that nearly one-third of co-foundresses are completely unrelated to the dominant individual whose offspring they help to rear and yet reproductive skew is high. These unrelated subordinates stand to gain direct fitness through nest inheritance, raising the question of whether their behaviour is adaptively tailored towards maximizing inheritance prospects. Unusually, in this species, a wealth of theory and empirical data allows us to predict how unrelated subordinates should behave. Based on these predictions, here we compare helping in subordinates that are unrelated or related to the dominant wasp across an extensive range of field-based behavioural contexts. We find no differences in foraging effort, defense behaviour, aggression or inheritance rank between unrelated helpers and their related counterparts. Our study provides no evidence, across a number of behavioural scenarios, that the behaviour of unrelated subordinates is adaptively modified to promote direct fitness interests.

Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0011997 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 11997&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0011997

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0011997

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().