Data from: A caste differentiation mutant elucidates the evolution of socially parasitic ants

Most ant species have two distinct female castes – queens and workers – yet the developmental and genetic mechanisms that produce these alternative phenotypes remain poorly understood. Working with the clonal raider ant, Ooceraea biroi, we discovered a variant strain that expresses queen-like traits in individuals that would normally become workers. The variants show changes in morphology, behavior, and fitness that cause them to rely on workers in wild-type (WT) colonies for survival. Overall, they resemble the queens of many obligately parasitic ants that have evolutionarily lost the worker caste and live inside colonies of closely related hosts. To understand the genetic basis of this variant strain, which we term the queen-like mutants (QLM), we re-analyzed published PacBio and Hi-C data (McKenzie and Kronauer 2018) using the Falcon pipeline.