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
Eva Schultner
University of Regensburg, Germany
Developmental plasticity in ants
Abstract: Ants exhibit spectacular phenotypic variation between and within sexes. The most prominent example is queen-worker dimorphism, which reaches extreme levels in species in which workers completely lack reproductive organs. How queen and worker phenotypes are determined, and how they differentiate over the course of development, has been a central question in ant research for over a century. Nevertheless, until recently progress in understanding the mechanisms underlying these developmental processes has been slow, also because ants rear their brood in piles and larval phenotypes mostly do not diverge until late in development. In my talk, I will present an overview of our current understanding of queen-worker development in ants, with a special focus on recent advances which promise to revolutionize how we think about this fundamental aspect of ant biology.
Host: Richard Merrill