Study spells out why some insects kill their mothers

Re:Study spells out why some insects kill their mothers by danharaj on Saturday October 31, 2015 @10:32PM (#10485205)

It makes me think that our naming of the brood mother "Queen" and the drones as "Workers" is actually a human biased understanding of the behavioral structure of eusocial insects. It is easy for us to impose on other organisms the notion of a hierarchy of subordination when we observe their organizational behaviors, but how often does this unexamined bias hinder understanding?

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Re:Study spells out why some insects kill their mothers by PhasmaFelis on Saturday October 31, 2015 @10:51PM (#10485237)

I was thinking something similar. "Queen" implies a sort of authority or social dominance which, AFAIK, is not generally present in eusocial species. The "queen" is an egg factory, not a leader, and the workers' relationship to her is more like engineers:factory than attendants:royalty.

I'm okay with "worker" as a name because it's a literal description of their behavior, but you're right that it shouldn't be interpreted as a social status.

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Re:Study spells out why some insects kill their mothers by whyIndeed on Saturday October 31, 2015 @11:59PM (#10485367)

Well, these are a different species of insect though. Yellow jackets are wasps, fundamentally different from honey bees.

The behavior of honey bees is one driven moreso by an inherited willingness to engage in servitude, than with wasps. Wasps are predatory carnivores, and their nests are smaller, more distributed, and constructed out of found materials, modified and pasted together. Wasps don't construct nests of secreted wax, they use mud and chewed up wood. Most wasps don't make any honey.

In honey bee hives, the manner of reproduction and sex selection is different. The queen really is the window through which the genome passes, and her capacity to produce devoted offspring, hopelessly obedient to her brand of pheremones, is her mark of success as an organism. And if she produced peers and not subjects she'd never have the spare time or the environment in which to gestate her offspring.

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Re:Study spells out why some insects kill their mothers by marincounty on Sunday November 01, 2015 @03:36AM (#10485812)

Don't understand why wasps kill poor little honey bees. They don't even eat the bees? I saw one wasp trying to kill a honey bee in my back yard. I got some tweezers and saved the honey bee. It felt good, and I didn't get bit.

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Re:Study spells out why some insects kill their mothers by DrScump on Sunday November 01, 2015 @04:07AM (#10485871)

it gets worse. Look up the recent PBS biopic of E.O. Wilson and his studies of matabele ants, which predate on (and exclusively eat) termites.

And worse yet, there are species of predatory fungi that infect insects, turning them into virtual slaves even while consuming their failing bodies.

Sleep well.

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Re:Study spells out why some insects kill their mothers by kentosi on Sunday November 01, 2015 @05:20AM (#10486011)

Can you please share the name of this fungi?

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Re:Study spells out why some insects kill their mothers by bananaoomarang on Sunday November 01, 2015 @05:34AM (#10486032)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis

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