Population Age Structure Shapes Selection On Social Behaviour In A Long-Lived Insect
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-16-2024
Published In
Philosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Abstract
Social traits are expected to experience highly context-dependent selection, but we know little about the contextual factors that shape selection on social behaviours. We hypothesized that the fitness consequences of social interactions will depend on the age of social partners, and therefore that population age structure will shape evolutionary pressures on sociality. Here, we investigate the consequences of age variation at multiple levels of social organization for both individual fitness and sexual selection on social network traits. We experimentally manipulated the age composition of populations of the forked fungus beetle Bolitotherus cornutus, creating 12 replicate populations with either young or old age structures. We found that fitness is associated with variance in age at three different levels of organization: the individual, interacting social partners, and the population. Older individuals have higher reproductive success, males pay a fitness cost when they interact with old males and females achieve lower fitness in older populations. In addition to influencing fitness, population age structure also altered the selection acting on social network position in females. Female sociality is under positive selection only in old populations. Our results highlight age structure as an understudied demographic variable shaping the landscape of selection on social behaviour.
Keywords
social behaviour, animal social networks, insect ageing
Recommended Citation
P. A. Cook, R. A. Costello, E. D. Brodie III, and Vincent A. Formica.
(2024).
"Population Age Structure Shapes Selection On Social Behaviour In A Long-Lived Insect".
Philosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Volume 279,
Issue 1916.
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2023.0331
https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-biology/703