ArticleScientific reports2016
The foundress's dilemma: group selection for cooperation among queens of the harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex californicus.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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11 citing papers in PubMed, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- Steady-State and Dynamical Behavior of a PDE Model of Multilevel Selection with Pairwise Group-Level Competition.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2025Article
- Evolutionary genomics of socially polymorphic populations of Pogonomyrmex californicus.BMC biology · 2024Article
- Body mass and cuticular hydrocarbon profiles, but not queen number, underlie worker desiccation resistance in a facultatively polygynous harvester ant (Pogonomyrmex californicus).Journal of comparative physiology. B, Biochemical, systemic, and environmental physiology · 2023Article
- Genome assembly and annotation of the California harvester ant Pogonomyrmex californicus.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2021Article
- Cooperation by ant queens during colony-founding perpetuates alternative forms of social organization.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2021Article
- Nutrient status shapes selfish mitochondrial genome dynamics across different levels of selection.eLife · 2020Article
- Colony co-founding in ants is an active process by queens.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- The replicator dynamics for multilevel selection in evolutionary games.Journal of mathematical biology · 2019Article
- Ecological drivers and reproductive consequences of non-kin cooperation by ant queens.Oecologia · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The evolution of cooperation is a fundamental problem in biology, especially for non-relatives, where indirect fitness benefits cannot counter within-group inequalities. Multilevel selection models show how cooperation can evolve if it generates a group-level advantage, even when cooperators are disadvantaged within their group. This allows the possibility of group selection, but few examples have been described in nature. Here we show that group selection can explain the evolution of cooperative nest founding in the harvester ant Pogonomyrmex californicus. Through most of this species' range, colonies are founded by single queens, but in some populations nests are instead founded by cooperative groups of unrelated queens. In mixed groups of cooperative and single-founding queens, we found that aggressive individuals had a survival advantage within their nest, but foundress groups with such non-cooperators died out more often than those with only cooperative members. An agent-based model shows that the between-group advantage of the cooperative phenotype drives it to fixation, despite its within-group disadvantage, but only when population density is high enough to make between-group competition intense. Field data show higher nest density in a population where cooperative founding is common, consistent with greater density driving the evolution of cooperative foundation through group selection.
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