Kin structure provides no explanation for intruders in social aphids

Temporal division of labor in an aphid social system

Temporal division of labor, or age polyethism, in which altruistic caste individuals change their tasks with aging, is widely found in bees and ants (Hymenoptera) and also in other social insects. Here we report the discovery of elaborate age polyethism in a social aphid (Hemiptera). Tuberaphis styraci is a gall-forming aphid in which monomorphic first instar nymphs differentiate into normal nymphs and soldiers upon second instar molt. Soldiers neither grow nor reproduce but perform gall cleaning and colony defense. Using an artificial diet rearing system, we collected age-defined groups of soldiers and monitored their social behaviors. We observed that young soldiers tend to clean whereas old soldiers preferentially attack, thereby verifying age-dependent task switching from housekeeping to defense. Strategic sampling, age estimation and behavioral observation of soldiers from natural galls revealed that (1) young cleaning soldiers tend to inhabit upper gall regions with adult insects, (2) old attacking soldiers tend to be distributed in lower gall regions, particularly around the gall openings, and (3) the gall structure is linked to intra-nest movement, aging and task switching of soldiers in an adaptive manner. These results highlight an evolutionary parallelism comparable to the sophisticated temporal division of labor observed in honeybee colonies.

The other insect societies: overview and new directions

The diversity of societies and forms of social interaction across the Arthropoda is commensurate with the great taxonomic diversity within this pylum. Social evolution research has, however, largely focused on a small subset of social forms; namely, those deemed to be 'eusocial'-groups exhibiting overlapping generations, cooperative brood care, and reproductive division of labor. Here I provide a brief overview of the 'other', non-eusocial, societies of insects and allies, defining the main social traits of interest and summarizing recent work. Four active and emerging fields of inquiry in the other insect societies are discussed.

Chemical Ecology and Sociality in Aphids: Opportunities and Directions

Aphids have long been recognized as good phytochemists. They are small sap-feeding plant herbivores with complex life cycles that can involve cyclical parthenogenesis and seasonal host plant alternation, and most are plant specialists. Aphids have distinctive traits for identifying and exploiting their host plants, including the expression of polyphenisms, a form of discrete phenotypic plasticity characteristic of insects, but taken to extreme in aphids. In a relatively small number of species, a social polyphenism occurs, involving sub-adult "soldiers" that are behaviorally or morphologically specialized to defend their nestmates from predators. Soldiers are sterile in many species, constituting a form of eusociality and reproductive division of labor that bears striking resemblances with other social insects. Despite a wealth of knowledge about the chemical ecology of non-social aphids and their phytophagous lifestyles, the molecular and chemoecological mechanisms involved in social polyphenisms in aphids are poorly understood. We provide a brief primer on aspects of aphid life cycles and chemical ecology for the non-specialists, and an overview of the social biology of aphids, with special attention to chemoecological perspectives. We discuss some of our own efforts to characterize how host plant chemistry may shape social traits in aphids. As good phytochemists, social aphids provide a bridge between the study of insect social evolution sociality, and the chemical ecology of plant-insect interactions. Aphids provide many promising opportunities for the study of sociality in insects, and to understand both the convergent and novel traits that characterize complex sociality on plants.

Reproduction and dispersal in an ant-associated root aphid community

Clonal organisms with occasional sex are important for our general understanding of the costs and benefits that maintain sexual reproduction. Cyclically parthenogenetic aphids are highly variable in their frequency of sexual reproduction. However, studies have mostly focused on free-living aphids above ground, whereas dispersal constraints and dependence on ant-tending may differentially affect the costs and benefits of sex in subterranean aphids. Here, we studied reproductive mode and dispersal in a community of root aphids that are obligately associated with the ant Lasius flavus. We assessed the genetic population structure of four species (Geoica utricularia, Tetraneura ulmi, Forda marginata and Forda formicaria) in a Dutch population and found that all species reproduce predominantly if not exclusively asexually, so that populations consist of multiple clonal lineages. We show that population viscosity is high and winged aphids rare, consistent with infrequent horizontal transmission between ant host colonies. The absence of the primary host shrub (Pistacia) may explain the absence of sex in three of the studied species, but elm trees (Ulmus) that are primary hosts of the fourth species (T. ulmi) occurred within a few km of the study population. We discuss the extent to which obligate ant-tending and absence of primary hosts may have affected selection for permanent parthenogenesis, and we highlight the need for further study of these aphids in Southern Europe where primary hosts may occur close to L. flavus populations, so that all four root aphid species would have realistic opportunities for completing their sexual life cycle.

The impact of clonal mixing on the evolution of social behaviour in aphids

Reports of substantial clonal mixing measured in social aphid colonies seem, on the face of it, to rule out population structure as an explanation of this enigmatic insect's social behaviour. To clarify how selection operates in aphids, and to disentangle direct and indirect fitness components, we present a model of the life cycle of a typical colony-dwelling aphid. The model incorporates ecological factors and includes a trade-off between investing in social behaviour and investing in reproduction. Our focus on inclusive fitness contrasts with previous approaches that optimize colony output. Through deriving a variant of Hamilton's rule, we show that a simple relationship can be established between the patch-carrying capacity and immigration rates into patches. Our results indicate that the levels of clonal mixing reported are not inconsistent with social behaviour. We discuss our model in terms of the evolutionary origins of social behaviour in aphids.

On the evolution of dispersal and altruism in aphids

How competitive interactions and population structure promote or inhibit cooperation in animal groups remains a key challenge in social evolution. In eusocial aphids, there is no single explanation for what predisposes some lineages of aphids to sociality, and not others. Because the assumption has been that most aphid species occur in essentially clonal groups, the roles of intra- and interspecific competition and population structure in aphid sociality have been given little consideration. Here, I used microsatellites to evaluate the patterns of variation in the clonal group structure of both social and nonsocial aphid species. Multiclonal groups are consistent features across sites and host plants, and all species-social or not-can be found in groups composed of large fractions of multiple clones, and even multiple species. Between-group dispersal in gall-forming aphids is ubiquitous, implying that factors acting ultimately to increase between-clone interactions and decrease within-group relatedness were present in aphids prior to the origins of sociality. By demonstrating that between-group dispersal is common in aphids, and thus interactions between clones are also common, these results suggest that understanding the ecological dynamics of dispersal and competition may offer unique insights into the evolutionary puzzle of sociality in aphids.

Genetic and genomic analyses of the division of labour in insect societies

Division of labour--individuals specializing in different activities--features prominently in the spectacular success of the social insects. Until recently, genetic and genomic analyses of division of labour were limited to just a few species. However, research on an ever-increasing number of species has provided new insight, from which we highlight two results. First, heritable influences on division of labour are more pervasive than previously imagined. Second, different forms of division of labour, in lineages in which eusociality has arisen independently, have evolved through changes in the regulation of highly conserved molecular pathways associated with several basic life-history traits, including nutrition, metabolism and reproduction.