ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2021
The evolution of body size in termites.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Pooled it
- The diversity of social complexity in termites.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Resource adaptation drives the size-complexity rule in termites.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Body size of fungus-growing termites infers on the volume and density of their fungal cultivar.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Ancestral sex-role plasticity facilitates the evolution of same-sex sexual behavior.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Termite nest evolution fostered social parasitism by termitophilous rove beetles.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- The evolution of body size in termites.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Termites are social cockroaches. Because non-termite cockroaches are larger than basal termite lineages, which themselves include large termite species, it has been proposed that termites experienced a unidirectional body size reduction since they evolved eusociality. However, the validity of this hypothesis remains untested in a phylogenetic framework. Here, we reconstructed termite body size evolution using head width measurements of 1638 modern and fossil termite species. We found that the unidirectional body size reduction model was only supported by analyses excluding fossil species. Analyses including fossil species suggested that body size diversified along with speciation events and estimated that the size of the common ancestor of modern termites was comparable to that of modern species. Our analyses further revealed that body size variability among species, but not body size reduction, is associated with features attributed to advanced termite societies. Our results suggest that miniaturization took place at the origin of termites, while subsequent complexification of termite societies did not lead to further body size reduction.
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Registered trials
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