Inter-clonal competition over queen succession imposes a cost of parthenogenesis on termite colonies

In social insect colonies, selfish behaviour due to intracolonial conflict among members can result in colony-level costs despite close relatedness. In certain termite species, queens use asexual reproduction for within-colony queen succession but rely on sexual reproduction for worker and alate production, resulting in multiple half-clones of a single primary queen competing for personal reproduction. Our study demonstrates that competition over asexual queen succession among different clone types leads to the overproduction of parthenogenetic offspring, resulting in the production of dysfunctional parthenogenetic alates. By genotyping the queens of 23 field colonies of Reticulitermes speratus, we found that clone variation in the queen population reduces as colonies develop. Field sampling of alates and primary reproductives of incipient colonies showed that overproduced parthenogenetic offspring develop into alates that have significantly smaller body sizes and much lower survivorshi..., (a) Clonal drive in queen population
We collected 175 colonies with kings and queens of R. speratus in pine or Japanese cedar forests in Kyoto, Shiga, Wakayama, Nagano, and Chiba, Japan from May to September 2017–2019. All termites were extracted from the nest within 10 days of collection, and the phenotypes of kings and queens (primary or secondary) and the number of each were recorded. The data were included in sheets “colony information” and “no. of royals”. Of the 175 total colonies, 28 were used for the genotyping analyses. Twenty secondary queens were randomly selected from each colony and stored at −80°C for genotyping. Primary queens were found in four of the colonies and were also stored for genotyping. The genotyping data were included in sheet “genotype of SQs”. Of the 28 colonies used for the genotyping analysis, 23 were used for taking queen weight measurements. Termites in the 23 colonies were extracted from the nest within 2 days of collection, and fresh weights of second..., , # Data from: Inter-clonal competition over queen succession imposes a cost of parthenogenesis on termite colonies

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cjsxksndz](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cjsxksndz)

This dataset contains supplementary data associated with Yao *et al.* 2024 *Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences*.

## Description of the data and file structure

This data contains dataset and R code.

The \"code.Rmd\" file includes R code for statistical analyses.

The \"dataset.xlsx\" file is divided into 8 sheets as detailed below:

\- sheet \"colony information\"

Contains data on the collection locations and collection dates of the colonies used in the study. Columns are described below:

\"colony\" = data on colony IDs

\"location\" = data on sites where colonies were collected

\"collection_date\" = data on date colony was sampled (YYYY/MM/DD)

 

\- sheet \"no. of royals\"

Contains the number of kings and queens in the colony. Columns are described below:

\"colony\" = data on c...