Every semester, EES organise a seminar series, which takes place on Mondays at 16:00 at Biozentrum, Lecture Hall B 01.019
Winter Semester 2025/26
Antonella Soro
Universität Halle - Germany
The role of plasticity in the evolution of eusociality: lessons from the halictid bees
Abstract: Eusociality is a major evolutionary innovation that has independently evolved multiple times across the insects. Queens and workers, respectively responsible for reproducing and working, are the defining feature of eusocial systems in the Hymenoptera and an extraordinary example of phenotypic plasticity, generally understood as a one-to-many genotype-to-phenotype mapping. In the halictid bees(Hymenoptera: Halictidae) eusociality has independently arisen twice, has been elaborated upon and subsequently been repeatedly lost. These bees are commonly defined as ‘primitively eusocial’ because castes are not morphological, but mainlybehavioural and, interestingly, potentially reversible, showing an individual dimension of phenotypic plasticity that is absent in the advanced eusocial honeybee. Drawing from years of research on social behaviour in the halictid bees, I aim to show the extent to which there is support for the idea that the evolutionary origin of eusociality is rooted in context-dependent expression of social behaviour and the developmental plasticity of ancestral behavioural traits.
“Novelties come from previously unseen association of old material. To create is to recombine”. François Jacob (1977). Evolution and Tinkering. Science, 196:1161–1166
Host: Natascha Turetzek & Sonja Grath
Previous and future talks in the EES seminar series