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Can Dufour’s gland compounds honestly signal fertility in the primitively eusocial wasp Ropalidia marginata?

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Abstract

Unlike queens of typical primitively eusocial species, Ropalidia marginata queens are docile and non-interactive, and hence cannot be using dominance to maintain their status. It appears that the queen maintains reproductive monopoly through a pheromone, of which the Dufour’s gland is at least one source. Here, we reconfirm earlier results showing that queens and workers can be correctly classified on a discriminant function using the compositions of their respective Dufour’s glands, and also demonstrate consistent queen–worker differences based on categories of compounds and on single compounds also in some cases. Since the queen pheromone is expected to be an honest signal of the fecundity of a queen, we investigate the correlation of Dufour’s gland compounds with ovarian activation of queens. Our study shows that Dufour’s gland compounds in R. marginata correlate with the state of ovarian activation of queens, suggesting that such compounds may portray the fecundity of a queen, and may indeed function as honest signals of fertility.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the Department of Science and Technology, the Department of Biotechnology, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and the Ministry of Environments and Forests, Government of India for financial assistance. Chemical analyses, ovarian measurements, and statistical analyses were done by AM. AM and RG co-wrote the paper, and RG supervised the overall work. All experiments reported here comply with the current laws of the country in which they were performed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, 560012, India

    Aniruddha Mitra & Raghavendra Gadagkar

  2. Evolutionary and Organismal Biology Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Jakkur, Bangalore, India

    Raghavendra Gadagkar

Authors
  1. Aniruddha Mitra
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  2. Raghavendra Gadagkar
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Raghavendra Gadagkar.

Electronic supplementary material

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ESM 1

Method followed for gas chromatographic analyses of Dufour’s glands of Ropalidia marginata (PDF 223 kb)

ESM 2

Flame ionisation detection gas chromatogram of a pooled sample of Ropalidia marginata Dufour’s glands and table showing identity of each peak (PDF 1,179 kb)

ESM 3

Percent area under linear, monomethyl and dimethyl alkanes for workers and queens of Ropalidia marginata (PDF 534 kb)

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Mitra, A., Gadagkar, R. Can Dufour’s gland compounds honestly signal fertility in the primitively eusocial wasp Ropalidia marginata?. Naturwissenschaften 98, 157–161 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-010-0749-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-010-0749-9

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