An invasive social insect overcomes genetic load at the sex locus.
Rosalyn Gloag, Guiling Ding, Joshua R Christie, Gabriele Buchmann, Madeleine Beekman, Benjamin P Oldroyd
Author Information
Rosalyn Gloag: Behaviour and Genetics of Social Insects Laboratory, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Macleay Building A12, University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia.
Guiling Ding: Behaviour and Genetics of Social Insects Laboratory, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Macleay Building A12, University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia.
Joshua R Christie: Behaviour and Genetics of Social Insects Laboratory, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Macleay Building A12, University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia.
Gabriele Buchmann: Behaviour and Genetics of Social Insects Laboratory, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Macleay Building A12, University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia.
Madeleine Beekman: Behaviour and Genetics of Social Insects Laboratory, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Macleay Building A12, University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia. ORCID
Benjamin P Oldroyd: Behaviour and Genetics of Social Insects Laboratory, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Macleay Building A12, University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia.
Some invasive hymenopteran social insects found new populations with very few reproductive individuals. This is despite the high cost of founder effects for such insects, which generally require heterozygosity at a single locus-the complementary sex determiner, csd-to develop as females. Individuals that are homozygous at csd develop as either infertile or subfertile diploid males or not at all. Furthermore, diploid males replace the female workers that are essential for colony function. Here we document how the Asian honey bee (Apis cerana) overcame the diploid male problem during its invasion of Australia. Natural selection prevented the loss of rare csd alleles due to genetic drift and corrected the skew in allele frequencies caused by founder effects to restore high average heterozygosity. Thus, balancing selection can alleviate the genetic load at csd imposed by severe bottlenecks, and so facilitate invasiveness.
