Larger colony sizes favoured the evolution of more worker castes in ants

Data consists of a single Excel file that contains trait information for 794 species of ants. References for the data are contained in a separate file within this repository. We also upload the list of species that were excluded from the analysis with the justification for doing so provided in the supplementary material of the paper.

We collected data on five ant traits: (i) the number of discrete physical worker castes; (ii) colony size (number of workers in mature colonies); (iii) effective queen mating frequency (estimated number of mates weighted by the proportion of offspring sired by each male; referred to as ‘queen mating frequency’); (iv) observed number of queens per colony; and (v) variation in worker size. We started by gathering data from major reviews, comparative studies, and books, and then performed a topic search of the primary literature using Web of Science. In total, we collected data for 794 species from 160 different genera.

All analyses performed in either R or BayesTraits V4.

Code can be found at GitHub:

https://github.com/LouisBell-Roberts/Larger_colony_sizes_favoured_the_evolution_of_more_worker_castes_in_ants