Parthenogenesis in termites

GIRL POWER !

“[Much like] gender-equal societies in humans, termite colonies commonly have equal numbers of males and females,” explains Yashiro, a biologist at the University of Sydney. “Both males and females work equally to make the society function.”

During fieldwork on the coast of Japan, Yashiro and his colleagues were surprised to stumble across several populations of Glyptotermes nakajimai termites that appeared to be exclusively female. The only way for these colonies to sustain themselves would be through asexual reproduction, but Yashiro’s burden of proof was enormous. To test this theory, he would have to painstakingly rule out the presence of males in colonies of thousands of insects.

Which, suffice to say, he did. A single gender can have advantages, besides the obvious ability to reproduce from a single individual...

With their relatively unarmored bodies, termites aren’t built for the offensive. Instead, when the colony is under attack, the insect’s main mode of defense often involves plugging the entrances to their nests with their own heads. A variety of head sizes could actually be a burden rather than a boon, meaning the loss of males may have actually empowered these female fighters to survive an assault.

But in the long run this is generally bad.

The fact that most termites haven’t yet transitioned to chastity may be due to an evolutionary advantage of sexual reproduction. As it turns out, sex is useful for maintaining the health of a colony. Mixing the genes of both parents generates diversity in a population, which comes in handy when extreme circumstances strike, such as disease or a shift in environment.

Because diversity provides a critical safeguard in the face of microbial infections, Rosengaus says it will be important for future work to look at how susceptible these different groups are to disease. It’s possible that asexual, all-female colonies have survived only in Shikoku and Kyushu because these regions aren’t as rife with termite pathogens — but this theory has yet to be tested.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/all-female-termite-colonies-reproduce-without-male-input-180970393/