ArticleNature ecology & evolution2024
Larger colony sizes favoured the evolution of more worker castes in ants.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Transposable elements as evolutionary catalysts of ant macrodiversity.Science advances · 2026Article
- Endoreduplication underlies body size variation in monomorphic ants.Frontiers in zoology · 2026Article
- Adaptive evolution of odorant receptors is associated with elaborations of social organization in ants.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- A population threshold for dedicated teaching.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Article
- Larger colony sizes favour greater division of labour between queens and workers in ants.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2026Article
- Environmental conditions shape the global distribution of ant societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Influences of pupal presence and worker number on the survival and development of pharaoh ant (Animal cells and systems · 2026Article
- Ant Diversity and Stratification in an Amazonian Rainforest.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- A Novel Supergene Controls Queen Size and Colony Social Organization in the Ant Myrmica ruginodis.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Article
- Functional divergence of conserved developmental plasticity genes between two distantly related nematodes.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Supergene regulation of ant social organization: a P haplotype in workers shifts colony ontogeny towards multiple queens.Communications biology · 2025Article
- A phylogenetic approach to comparative genomics.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2025Review
- Social control drove ant evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Division of labour as key driver of social evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Group size and labour demands determine division of labour as a consequence of demographic stochasticity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The size-complexity hypothesis is a leading explanation for the evolution of complex life on earth. It predicts that in lineages that have undergone a major transition in organismality, larger numbers of lower-level subunits select for increased division of labour. Current data from multicellular organisms and social insects support a positive correlation between the number of cells and number of cell types and between colony size and the number of castes. However, the implication of these results is unclear, because colony size and number of cells are correlated with other variables which may also influence selection for division of labour, and causality could be in either direction. Here, to resolve this problem, we tested multiple causal hypotheses using data from 794 ant species. We found that larger colony sizes favoured the evolution of increased division of labour, resulting in more worker castes and greater variation in worker size. By contrast, our results did not provide consistent support for alternative hypotheses regarding either queen mating frequency or number of queens per colony explaining variation in division of labour. Overall, our results provide strong support for the size-complexity hypothesis.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.