Abstract
Cyclical oligogyny is considered to be the mechanism that is most likely to be responsible for stabilizing cooperation in polygynous, epiponine wasps, in which single-queen colonies produce new queens and multiple-queen colonies produce males. In contrast with the number of studies on relatedness among adult females, we know little about relatedness among males in polygynous epiponine wasps. We estimated worker and male relatedness in the Brazilian epiponine wasp Polybia paulista Ihering and found that colonies of P. paulista produced males when they contained multiple queens. Although average relatedness within males did not differ significantly from 0.5, the number of alleles observed suggests that there were more than one queen to produce males in each colony. Our data would be helpful to elucidate dynamics of the male production in a colony of epiponine wasps.
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Acknowledgments
This study was supported in part by Research Fellowships of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) for Young Scientists to K. Kudô (no. 02415) and the JSPS Fellowships for Research Abroad to K. Kudô. We thank two anonymous referees who made invaluable comments and suggestions for the improvement of the text.
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Edited by Fernando B Noll – UNESP
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Kudô, K., Sugawara, S., Shinohara, K. et al. Estimates of Genetic Relatedness Among Males in a Polygynous Wasp. Neotrop Entomol 42, 137–140 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13744-012-0098-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13744-012-0098-9