Abstract
One of the fundamental principles of social organization, age polyethism, describes behavioral maturation of workers leading to switches in task preference. Here we present a system that allows for studying division of labor (DOL) by taking advantage of the relative short life of Cardiocondyla obscurior workers and thereby the pace of behavioral transitions. By challenging same-age young and older age cohorts to de novo establish DOL into nurse and foraging tasks and by forcing nurses to precociously become foragers and vice versa we studied expression patterns of one of the best known candidates for social insect worker behavior, the foraging gene. Contrary to our expectations we found that foraging gene expression correlates with age, but not with the task foraging per se. This suggests that this nutrition-related gene, and the pathways it is embedded in, correlates with physiological changes over time and potentially primes, but not determines task preference of individual workers.
Highlights
Age or temporal polyethism in holometabolous insect societies describes the common transition from young workers performing brood/queen care to nest duties and to exploration of the environment and foraging later in life
For interpretation of the qPCR data we used the relative 2-ΔCq [17] method, followed by a Mann-Whitney-U test within treatments in R (“wilcox.test”). Both control experiments showed the predicted direction of differential expression with callows engaged in nursing behavior (W = 25, p
In line with previous studies on ants [12,14], control callows and young nurses had relative higher Cofor expression levels than foragers, suggesting that C. obscurior follows an age-related behavioral trajectory with young nurses and older foragers
Summary
Age or temporal polyethism in holometabolous insect societies describes the common transition from young workers performing brood/queen care to nest duties and to exploration of the environment and foraging later in life. Age polyethism profoundly shapes social organization but the proximate mechanisms for its formation are unknown. It has been suggested that intrinsic physiological changes of individuals could render their behavior with age [1]. Even though individuals may have altered physiology, individual experience and social environment may drive behavior, providing a system where demand and not physiology shapes behavior [2]. Age is only partly predictive for worker behavior as shown in bee and ant workers that readily switch between interior and exterior tasks in response to environmental conditions The switch of honey bee foragers to so called “reverted nurses” is accompanied by re-appearance of nurse-like methylation patterns which affect, among others, genes involved with regulation of transcription [5]
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