Social Evolution in Termites

The termites’ social organization strikingly resembles that of ants. Yet termites are social cockroaches and this heritage shaped their social evolution. Although all termites are eusocial (due to the occurrence of sterile soldiers) different degrees of worker altruism can be distinguished. Mapping them onto a phylogenetic tree together with distinctive properties associated with the life types of different termite families provides insights into the termites’ social evolution. Based on currently available data, these results suggest that a crucial step, for the evolution of altruistic termite workers with intensive brood care, were ‘workers’ that gained direct fitness benefits, similar to helper systems in cooperative breeding vertebrates.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior

• Publication date

  Unknown publication date

• Fields of study

  Biology, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/B978-0-12-809633-8.20751-6
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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