Assessing behavioral and reproductive plasticity in a social orchid bee


SOCIETY FOR INTEGRATIVE AND COMPARATIVE BIOLOGY
2021 VIRTUAL ANNUAL MEETING (VAM)
January 3 – Febuary 28, 2021

Meeting Abstract


99-6  Sat Jan 2  Assessing behavioral and reproductive plasticity in a social orchid bee Saleh, NW*; Henske, J; Ramirez, S; University of California, Davis; Ruhr University Bochum; University of California, Davis nsaleh@ucdavis.edu http://nwsaleh.weebly.com

Social insects display remarkable plasticity, with a wide range of behavioral and physiological phenotypes induced by environmental factors throughout development and adulthood. This is most dramatically seen in the extreme physiological differences between queens and non-reproductive workers in eusocial insects such as honey bees, where caste differences are induced by diet. In species with small, casteless social groups less is known about the degree to which individuals can express similar changes in reproductive physiology. Some orchid bees, until recently thought of as solitary, have been shown to form small social groups of a single dominant bee and 1-2 subordinate helpers. However, little is known about degree of reproductive and behavioral specialization in these social groups. Here, we assess individual plasticity of social subordinates of the orchid bee Euglossa dilemma. We first performed an experiment to disrupt social nesting and then followed the behavioral, physiological, chemical, and transcriptomic responses of socially isolated subordinates in the field. We found that isolated subordinates express dramatic behavioral and physiological changes not typically seen in subordinate bees, demonstrating a high level of individual plasticity. Further, genes involved in these changes overlap substantially with genes involved in worker physiology in eusocial species, suggesting conserved mechanisms of plasticity in bees.

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