Data from: Non-nest mate discrimination and clonal colony structure in the parthenogenetic ant Cerapachys biroi

Understanding the interplay between cooperation and conflict in social
groups is a major goal of biology. One important factor is genetic
relatedness, and animal societies are usually composed of related but
genetically different individuals, setting the stage for conflicts over
reproductive allocation. Recently, however, it has been found that several
ant species reproduce predominantly asexually. Although this can
potentially give rise to clonal societies, in the few well-studied cases,
colonies are often chimeric assemblies of different genotypes, due to
worker drifting or colony fusion. In the ant Cerapachys biroi, queens are
absent and all individuals reproduce via thelytokous parthenogenesis,
making this species an ideal study system of asexual reproduction and its
consequences for social dynamics. Here, we show that colonies in our study
population on Okinawa, Japan, recognize and effectively discriminate
against foreign workers, especially those from unrelated asexual lineages.
In accord with this finding, colonies never contained more than a single
asexual lineage and average pairwise genetic relatedness within colonies
was extremely high (r = 0.99). This implies that the scope for social
conflict in C. biroi is limited, with unusually high potential for
cooperation and altruism.