Associate Professor Adria Le Boeuf - University of Cambridge

Metabolic division of labor across the superorganism

Behaviours that transmit metabolised materials from one body to another allow the genome of one individual to influence the fitness of another. In social transfers of care like lactation or egg-laying, this decoupling of resource acquisition, processing, and use over time, space, and across individuals results in metabolic division of labor. Social transfers that enable metabolic division of labor have led to profound shifts in ecology and life-history evolution in that these allow typically parents to process, package and transmit goods to offspring using specifically adapted proteins that lighten metabolic loads, modulate immune responses, and even direct development. Social insects engage in a multitude of social transfers – the classics of mating and egg laying, but also many forms of trophallaxis (including social regurgitation) with still darker transfers like larval hemolymph feeding and adaptive cannibalism. I will discuss our research unraveling metabolic division of labor in ant colonies, merging transcriptomics and proteomics to detail protein fluxes across the superorganism, unpicking the evolutionary causes and consequences of metabolic division of labor on ant evolution, morphology and behaviour, and finally what this means with regard to the major evolutionary transition toward superorganismality. This perspective recontextualises centuries of research to help us understand the innovations and constraints that have occurred over social insect evolution.