jwb

I dunno who that is but if you could get him to comment that's be cool. I appreciate your input anyway.

What you suggested about them not being able to recognize non kin sounds essentially like what they said happened in the one national geographic documentary that first brought this to my attention. They said something about either the ants from different nests stopped recognizing the difference between their scents or that somehow the scents were altered to be the same. Not sure which it was but basically the result is they don't seem to recognize that these ants from neighboring colonies aren't part of their colony.

Instead of this being a mutation that hurts the colony and leaves it vulnerable to more "selfish" traditional colonies, it seems like it lead to them spreading from Argentina to Europe and other parts of the globe.

It seems to me on the face of it that there is at least some utility/advantage to being able to drastically increase the scale on which colonies can cooperate, but I'm not sure if maybe it ultimately is unstable as you suggested it might be. I guess time will tell

Guybrush

That is exactly what I was thinking as well. And if they can't tell non-ant myrmecophiles (beetles/spiders/etc living in ant hills) from kin, they probably can't tell other non-kin-nestmates from kin. We also saw this in the documentary where the queen wood ant basically fought sugar ants (that's what we call them here, the little black ones). After fighting them for a while, she was lathered in their scents so they eventually accepted her presence. They had no real good defense once she had their smell on her. So I got the impression that if ants just start to stay together for some reason or start to mix, they should also start to share a scent and they won't be able to tell if anyone's not kin. With kin selection being such a tremendous shaping force in their past, they will then "kin select" for non-kin.

So with kin selection sort of stopped in its tracks, at least temporarily, I'll admit there might be some merit to Wilson's group selection arguments.

You're also right that this could make it unstable in the long run. It might be a while, though.

I may be blabbering on, but there's a concept in evolutionary which illustrates evolutionary constraints in a nice way which is fitness landscapes. They look kinda like this:



I'm not exactly sure what the landscapes here represent, but if we look at C, we can just make up a silly scenario for illustrative purposes. Lets just say birds and say that the landscape represents different adaptations in beak size. The dips and peaks in the chart represent fitness or how good an adaptation/strategy is (the higher the better). So the little peak to the right could be a small beak. It's good for cracking seeds so it's a good adaptation. However, there is an even more optimal beak size to the left in the landscape, illustrated by the largest peak. This could be a longer beak great for reaching insects hiding in the wood.

One might think if it's better to have a longer beak, that would simply evolve, but in this case the stepwise evolutionary path of gradual beak elongation would take the birds into a dip where the beak is a decidedly un-optimal shape. The middle ground adaptation, the in-between beak, has lower fitness than any of the positive strategies. So if some birds just start down that path, natural selection will work against them and push the population back up into the strategy they already have. Natural selection prevents them from evolving into the optimal beak shape strategy.

In order to make the "leap", they may have to make it as a single mutation, giving rise to one special bird with a much better beak. This happens for some traits, but it's not likely to happen for something like a bird beak.

So I'm not sure what the constraints would be to ants evolving kin-recognition, but constraints are usually present in some shape and it's not unlikely that there could be one or more and that the effect could be considerable.

edit:

I sent a mail to Hölldobler I don't expect an answer, but will of course share one if it comes.

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jwb