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.

解析社会群体中合作与冲突的交互作用机制，是生物学研究的核心目标之一。遗传相关性是其中一项关键影响因素；动物社会通常由亲缘相关但遗传背景各异的个体组成，这为繁殖资源分配方面的冲突埋下了隐患。然而近期研究发现，多种蚂蚁类群主要通过无性繁殖方式繁衍后代。尽管这种繁殖方式理论上可形成克隆种群，但在少数已被深入研究的案例中，由于工蚁漂移或种群融合现象，蚁群往往是不同基因型个体构成的嵌合集群。毕氏双节行军蚁（Cerapachys biroi）无蚁后，所有个体均通过产雌孤雌生殖繁衍后代，使其成为研究无性繁殖及其对社会动态影响的理想实验体系。本研究针对日本冲绳的毕氏双节行军蚁种群展开，结果显示该蚁群能够识别并有效区分外来工蚁，尤其是来自无亲缘关系无性谱系的个体。与该发现一致的是，所有蚁群均仅包含单一无性谱系，且蚁群内个体间的平均成对遗传相关性极高（r=0.99）。这表明毕氏双节行军蚁的社会冲突范围极为有限，其合作与利他行为的潜力远超多数同类类群。