The earliest known ants: an analysis of the Cretaceous species and an inference concerning their social organization
TLDR
The known Cretaceous formicoids are better interpreted from morphological evidence as forming a single subfamily, the Sphecomyrminae, and even a single genus, SpheComyrma, rather than multiple families and genera, and share some key traits with nonsocial aculeate wasps.Abstract:
The known Cretaceous formicoids are better interpreted from morphological evidence as forming a single subfamily, the Sphecomyrminae, and even a single genus, Sphecomyrma, rather than multiple families and genera. The females appear to have been differentiated as queen and worker castes belonging to the same colonial species instead of winged and wingless solitary females belonging to different species. The former conclusion is supported by the fact that the abdomens of workers of modern ant species and extinct Miocene ant species are smaller relative to the rest of the body than is the case for modern wingless solitary wasps. The wingless Cretaceous formicoids conform to the proportions of ant workers rather than to those of wasps (Figs. 1–2) and hence are reasonably interpreted to have lived in colonies. The Cretaceous formicoids are nevertheless anatomically primitive with reference to modern ants and share some key traits with nonsocial aculeate wasps. They were distributed widely over Laurasia and appear to have been much less abundant than modern ants.read more
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Evolution of the gene network underlying wing polyphenism in ants.
Ehab Abouheif,Gregory A. Wray +1 more
TL;DR: The expression of several genes within the network within the wing primordia of reproductive (winged) and sterile (wingless) ant castes is conserved in the winged castes of four ant species, whereas points of interruption within thenetwork in theWingless castes are evolutionarily labile.
Journal ArticleDOI
The origin of the attine ant-fungus mutualism.
TL;DR: The attine ant-fungus mutualism probably arose from adventitious interactions with fungi that grew on walls of nests built in leaf litter, or from a system of fungal myrmecochory in which specialized fungi relied on ants for dispersal and in which the ants fortuitously vectored these fungi from parent to offspring nests prior to a true fungicultural stage.
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Perspective metazoan complexity and evolution: is there a trend?
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a scheme for understanding complexity that provides a conceptual basis for objective measurement, and they also show complexity to be a broad term covering four independent types of complexity.
Introducción a las hormigas de la región Neotropical
Fernando Fernández,Edgard E. Palacio,Donat Agosti,Norm Johnson,M. Ospina,John E. Lattke,Michael Kaspari,R. Solvestre,Carlos Roberto Ferreira Brandão,Rosa Rosa da Silva,A. Dejean,Bruno Corbara,Jacques H. C. Delabie,Ángela María Arcila,F. H. Lozano-Zambrano,Gustavo Zabala,Carlos E. Sarmiento-M.,Barry Bolton,William P. Mackay,Fabiana Cuezzo,Philip S. Ward,T. M. C. Della Lucia,P. Chacón de Ulloa,Edward O. Wilson,C. Lauk +24 more
TL;DR: Aunque el libro procura tomar varios temas criticos (ecologia, relaciones con plantas, mosaicos), debido a limites de espacio necesariamente excluye otros temas.
References
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Book
The Insect Societies
TL;DR: In this article, a definitive study of the social structure and symbiotic relationships of termites, social wasps, bees, and ants was conducted. But the authors focused on the relationship between ants and termites.
Journal ArticleDOI
The First Mesozoic Ants, with the Description of a New Subfamily
Journal ArticleDOI
The First Mesozoic Ants
TL;DR: Two worker ants preserved in amber of Upper Cretaceous age have been found in New Jersey, making them the first undisputed remains of social insects of Mesozoic age and the earliest known fossils that can be assigned with certainty to aculeate Hymenoptera.