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Eusociality through conflict dissolution

View ORCID ProfileMauricio González-Forero, View ORCID ProfileJorge Peña
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.09.29.316877
Mauricio González-Forero
1School of Biology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK
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  • For correspondence: mgf3@st-andrews.ac.uk jorge.pena@iast.fr
Jorge Peña
2Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, University of Toulouse Capitole, Toulouse, France
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  • For correspondence: mgf3@st-andrews.ac.uk jorge.pena@iast.fr
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Abstract

Eusociality, where largely unreproductive offspring help their mothers reproduce, is a major form of social organization in social insects and other animals. An increasingly documented feature of eusociality is that mothers induce their offspring to help by means of hormones, pheromones, or behavioral displays, with evidence often indicating that offspring help voluntarily. The co-occurrence of widespread maternal influence and voluntary offspring help may be explained by what we call the converted helping hypothesis, whereby helping originally arising from maternal manipulation subsequently becomes voluntary. This hypothesis requires that parent-offspring conflict is eventually dissolved—for instance, if the benefit of helping increases sufficiently over evolutionary time. Here we show that maternal manipulation of offspring help enables the mother to increase her fertility to such extent that parent-offspring conflict is transformed into parent-offspring agreement. Such conflict dissolution mechanism requires that helpers alleviate the total percent life-history trade-off limiting maternal fertility, and results in reproductive division of labor, high queen fertility, and honest queen signaling suppressing worker reproduction, thus exceptionally recovering diverse features of eusociality. This mechanism is widely applicable, thus suggesting a general explanation for the origin of eusociality, the prevalence of maternal influence, and the offspring’s willingness to help. Overall, our results explain how a major evolutionary transition can happen from ancestral conflict.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • Introduction, Results, and Discussion expanded; Figures 1, 2, and 3 revised; Figure 4 added; Supplementary Information updated.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted November 17, 2020.
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Eusociality through conflict dissolution
Mauricio González-Forero, Jorge Peña
bioRxiv 2020.09.29.316877; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.09.29.316877
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Eusociality through conflict dissolution
Mauricio González-Forero, Jorge Peña
bioRxiv 2020.09.29.316877; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.09.29.316877

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