Ontogeny of superorganisms: Social control of queen specialization in ants

The functioning of biological systems relies on the cooperation of specialized components and understanding the processes that produce such specialization is a major challenge in biology. Here we study the ontogeny of biological systems at a new phenotypic level: the superorganisms (i.e., insect societies with specialized individuals). We investigate how founding queens, the earliest developmental stage of ant colonies, transition from expressing behavioral pluripotency to becoming strictly specialized in egg production. We demonstrate that the presence of workers both initiates and maintains this queen specialization and propose that such a social control of queen behavior is common in ants and regulated by ancestral mechanisms. These findings contradict the traditional view of social insect queens as being intrinsically specialized in egg production and may reshape our understanding of division of labor in insect societies. , All methods for the collection and analysis of the data are fully described in Majidifar et al (Functional Ecology, 2024)., , # Ontogeny of superorganisms: Social control of queen specialization in ants

The files contains all the data collected and analyzed in Majidifar et al. (Functional Ecology, 2024). All methods for the collection and analyses of the data are fully described in the article, and the R script for all statistical analyses of the datasets is available as Supporting Information.

This README file was generated on 2024-02-09 by Romain LIBBRECHT.

## GENERAL INFORMATION

### Title of Dataset
Ontogeny of superorganisms: Social control of queen specialization in ants

### Principal Investigator Contact Information

Name: Romain Libbrecht
Institution: Insect Biology Research Institute - UMR7261 - CNRS/University of Tours
Address: Tours, France
Email: [e-mail]

### Date of data collection
2017-2021

### Geographic location of data collection
Mainz, Germany

### Information about funding sources that supported the collection of the data
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German ...