Toward greater realism in inclusive fitness models: the case of caste fate conflict in insect societies
Data files
Jan 23, 2024 version files 134.82 KB
Abstract
In the field of social evolution, inclusive fitness theory has been successful in making a wide range of qualitative predictions on expected patterns of cooperation and conflict. Nevertheless, outside of sex ratio theory, inclusive fitness models that make accurate quantitative predictions remain relatively rare. Past models dealing with caste fate conflict in insect societies, for example, successfully predicted that if female larvae can control their own caste fate, an excess should opt to selfishly develop as queens. Available models, however, were unable to accurately predict levels of queen production observed in Melipona bees – a genus of stingless bees where caste is self-determined – as empirically observed levels of queen production are ca. two times lower than the theoretically predicted ones. Here, we show that this discrepancy can be resolved by explicitly deriving the colony-level cost of queen overproduction from a dynamic model of colony growth, requiring incorporation of parameters of colony growth and demography, such as the per-capita rate at which new brood cells are built and provisioned, the percentage of the queen’s eggs that are female, costs linked with worker reproduction and worker mortality. Our revised model predicts queen overproduction to more severely impact colony productivity, resulting in an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) that is ca. half that of the original model, and is shown to accurately predict actual levels of queen overproduction observed in different Melipona species. Altogether, this shows how inclusive fitness models can provide accurate quantitative predictions, provided that costs and benefits are modelled in sufficient detail and are measured precisely.
README
This zip directory contains all the necessary files to reproduce the findings reported in our associated paper, titled "Toward greater realism in inclusive fitness models: the case of caste fate conflict in insect societies".
Citation:
Ferreira, H. M., Alves, D. A., Cool, L., Oi, C. A., Oliveira, R. C., & Wenseleers, T. (2024). Toward greater realism in inclusive fitness models: the case of caste fate conflict in insect societies. Evolution Letters, qrad068.
The contents include:
I. Raw data files used for the statistics:
- 1_Queen_male_production_raw_data.csv : Species names, Population (refers to each sampled location), Locality, Ntcombs (number of combs accessed), Ntcolony (total number of colonies accessed), Ncolony (Number of colonies accessed per row), Ncomb(number of combs accessed per row), Idcolony (individual colony ID (xx_pooled refers to the fact that is lacking individual data per colony/comb), Tmonths (total number of months in which the colonies/combs were accessed), month (specific month in which the colonies/combs were accessed), NCells (number of cells accessed), Nfemales (number of females), Nworkers (number of workers), Nmq (number of queens reared in worker cells), Nrq (Number of queens reared in royal cells), Nmales (number of males), ref (reference to the article/theses/abstracts where the data was collected from). NA refers to missing data.
- 2_cell_building.csv : Species (Species name), population (refers to each sampled location), sampling_locality (City and/or Country where the colonies were sampled), colony (Colony individual ID), colony_size (colony size measured by number of workers), reference_colony_size (literature used to obtain colony size), observation_days (observation period in days), worker_days (colony_size*observation days, used to calculate how many cells were built per day, per worker), total_cells_built (total number of cells built over the mentioned period), cells_built_per_day (number of cells built per day), cells_built_per_day_per_worker (number of cells built per day per worker), total_nr_study_colonies_per_species (total number of colonies accessed per species), reference_cell_building (literature from where it was obtained information regarding the cell building for the mentioned species), notes (notes on gathering and processing information from the literature).
- 3_worker life expectancy.csv : species, population (refers to each sampled location), nstudies (number of sudies reporting worker life expectancy), avg_worker_lifespan (average worker life span in days), n (number of workers from which it was reported the worker life expectancy), ncols (number of colonies), reference & full reference (refers to the literature from where it was obtained the data on the worker life expectancy).
- 4_worker-reproduction.csv : species, population (refers to each sampled location), prop_WPM (proportion of Worker Produced Males), Nwpm (number of worker produced males), Nm (number of males for which the parentage was dtermined), Na (effective number of males for which the parentage could be assigned given the power of the technique used), Cols (number of colonies), Method (method used to infer male parentage: allozyme markers (A), behavioural data (B), microsatellite markers (M)), References (citations for articles providing data on worker reproduction).
II. R code & R environment
The script "caste_conflict_model_R_script_FINAL.r" was used to obtain the stats on the raw data. All the packages required are mentioned in the script that was developed on R version 4.1.1 (R Core Team 2021).
R environment file: "environment.RData".
III. Mathematica Notebook
A notebook file "caste fate conflict model_FINAL.nb" for developing the model on caste conflict. This file is compatible with Wolframe Mathematica version 10.0. A description of all the parameters is given in the notebook file.
PDF version of the Mathematica notebook: "caste fate conflict model_FINAL.pdf"
IV. All the remaining files were generated by running the R script on R version 4.1.1.
For any query or further assistance, please contact: Helena Mendes Ferreira (helena.mendesferreira@kuleuven.be or helenamf93@gmail.com).