Journal
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY
Volume 219, Issue 1, Pages 8-11Publisher
COMPANY BIOLOGISTS LTD
DOI: 10.1242/jeb.132803
Keywords
Animal behaviour; Endocrine; Behavioural development; Social insect
Categories
Funding
- Syngenta [BB/J011339/1]
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council [1284276] Funding Source: researchfish
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Division of labour in social insects represents a major evolutionary transition, but the physiological mechanisms that regulate this are still little understood. Experimental work with honey bees, and correlational analyses in other social insects, have implicated juvenile hormone (JH) as a regulatory factor, but direct experimental evidence of behavioural effects of JH in social insects is generally lacking. Here, we used experimental manipulation of JH to show that raised JH levels in leaf-cutting ants results in workers becoming more active, phototactic and threat responsive, and engaging in more extranidal activity - behavioural changes that we show are all characteristic of the transition from intranidal work to foraging. These behavioural effects on division of labour suggest that the JH mediation of behaviour occurs across multiple independent evolutions of eusociality, and may be a key endocrine regulator of the division of labour which has produced the remarkable ecological and evolutionary success of social insects.
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