ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Ancestral sex-role plasticity facilitates the evolution of same-sex sexual behavior.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Prevalence of Same-Sex Sexual Behavior in Termites: Persistence Under Mate-Seeking Stress Absence.Insects · 2026Article
- Multispecies analysis of social effects on same-sex sexual behavior challenges mistaken identity hypotheses in insects.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The significance of social interactions in synchronized swarming flight in a termite.Biology letters · 2024Article
- Extinct and extant termites reveal the fidelity of behavior fossilization in amber.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Same-sex Pairs Retain Their Reproductive Capacity as a Potential Opportunity for Individual Reproductive Success in Termites.Journal of insect science (Online) · 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
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Recent attempts to explain the evolutionary prevalence of same-sex sexual behavior (SSB) have focused on the role of indiscriminate mating. However, in many cases, SSB may be more complex than simple mistaken identity, instead involving mutual interactions and successful pairing between partners who can detect each other's sex. Behavioral plasticity is essential for the expression of SSB in such circumstances. To test behavioral plasticity's role in the evolution of SSB, we used termites to study how females and males modify their behavior in same-sex versus heterosexual pairs. Male termites follow females in paired "tandems" before mating, and movement patterns are sexually dimorphic. Previous studies observed that adaptive same-sex tandems also occur in both sexes. Here we found that stable same-sex tandems are achieved by behavioral plasticity when one partner adopts the other sex's movements, resulting in behavioral dimorphism. Simulations based on empirically obtained parameters indicated that this socially cued plasticity contributes to pair maintenance, because dimorphic movements improve reunion success upon accidental separation. A systematic literature survey and phylogenetic comparative analysis suggest that the ancestors of modern termites lack consistent sex roles during pairing, indicating that plasticity is inherited from the ancestor. Socioenvironmental induction of ancestral behavioral potential may be of widespread importance to the expression of SSB. Our findings challenge recent arguments for a prominent role of indiscriminate mating behavior in the evolutionary origin and maintenance of SSB across diverse taxa.
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