Formica fusca: Queen fecundity, worker entourage, and cuticular chemistry in the ant Formica fusca

Cooperative breeding entails conflicts over reproductive shares that may be settled in different ways. In ants, where several queens simultaneously reproduce in a colony, both queens and workers may influence the reproductive apportionment and offspring quality. Queens may vary in their intrinsic fecundity, which may influence the size of the worker entourage attending individual queens, and this may eventually dictate the reproductive output of a queen. We tested whether the reproductive success of queens is affected by the size of their worker entourage, their fecundity at the onset of the reproductive season, and whether the queen cuticular hydrocarbon profile carries information on fecundity. We show that in the ant Formica fusca both queen fecundity and egg hatching success increase with the size of their entourage, and that initially highly fecund queens lay larger eggs. Furthermore, higher relatedness among workers increased queen fecundity. Finally, the queens that received a la..., Laboratory experiments in which queens of the ant Formica fusca were allotted a large (50 workers) or a small (5 workers) entourage, and allowed to lay eggs. The reproductive output was recorded, the queens and 10 workers were genotyped, and the cuticlar hydrocarbon profiled of the queens were analysed.,