In Brief

16 January 2013

Social antics in ants inherited like sex chromosomes

FIRE ants are a family divided. When setting up a new colony, young queens go one of two ways. Some strike out on their own and remain independent, stockpiling fat reserves and creating workers that kill rival queens. But others prefer the communal life, joining colonies in which multiple queens reign side by side.

By sequencing the fire ant genome, Laurent Keller at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and colleagues discovered that two chromosome regions, social B (SB) and social b (Sb) determine the two types of behaviour. Each is made up of several hundred genes and inherited as SB/SB or SB/Sb pairs (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature11832).

Keller suggests that a similar inheritance pattern might also be found in other organisms. “If you have two or more very different types of behaviour within a single species, I’d be ready to guess that this is what’s going on,” he says.

It means that complex differences in behaviour and physiology can be inherited as a single unit, says an impressed Daniel Kronauer at the Rockefeller University in New York.