terminal investment individual reproduction of ant queens increases with age终端投资个体繁殖蚁女王随着年龄的增加.pdf

Terminal Investment: Individual Reproduction of Ant Queens Increases with Age ¨ Jurgen Heinze*, Alexandra Schrempf ¨ Biologie I, Universitat Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany Abstract The pattern of age-specific fecundity is a key component of the life history of organisms and shapes their ecology and evolution. In numerous animals, including humans, reproductive performance decreases with age. Here, we demonstrate that some social insect queens exhibit the opposite pattern. Egg laying rates of Cardiocondyla obscurior ant queens increased with age until death, even when the number of workers caring for them was kept constant. Cardiocondyla, and probably also other ants, therefore resemble the few select organisms with similar age-specific reproductive investment, such as corals, sturgeons, or box turtles (e.g., [1]), but they differ in being more short-lived and lacking individual, though not social, indeterminate growth. Furthermore, in contrast to most other organisms, in which average life span declines with increasing reproductive effort, queens with high egg laying rates survived as long as less fecund queens. Citation: Heinze J, Schrempf A (2012) Terminal Investment: Individual Reproduction of Ant Queens Increases with Age. PLoS ONE 7(4): e35201. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0035201 ´ Editor: Nicolas Chaline, Universite Paris 13, France Received January 12, 2012; Accepted March 13, 2012; Published April 11, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Heinze, Schrempf. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: The work was funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The funders had no