在社会进化领域,包容性适应度理论已成功地对合作和冲突的预期模式进行了广泛的定性预测。然而,在性别比理论之外,能够做出准确定量预测的包容性健身模型仍然相对罕见。过去处理昆虫社会种姓命运冲突的模型,例如,成功地预测,如果雌性幼虫能够控制自己的种姓命运,多余的人应该选择自私地发展为女王。可用型号,然而,无法准确预测在Melipona蜜蜂中观察到的女王产量水平,Melipona蜜蜂是种姓自定的一种无刺蜜蜂,因为根据经验观察到的女王产量水平比理论预测的低大约两倍。这里,我们表明,这种差异可以通过从殖民地生长的动态模型中明确推导出女王过度生产的殖民地水平成本来解决,需要纳入菌落生长和人口统计的参数,例如建造和配备新育苗细胞的人均比率,女王的卵是雌性的百分比,与工人生殖和工人死亡率相关的成本。我们修订后的模型预测女王生产过剩会更严重地影响殖民地生产力,导致进化稳定的策略,大约是原始模型的一半,并被证明可以准确预测在不同Melipona物种中观察到的女王生产过剩的实际水平。总之,这表明包容性健身模型如何提供准确的定量预测,前提是成本和收益得到了足够详细的建模和精确测量。
In the field of social evolution, inclusive fitness theory has been successful in making a wide range of qualitative predictions on expected patterns of cooperation and conflict. Nevertheless, outside of sex ratio theory, inclusive fitness models that make accurate quantitative predictions remain relatively rare. Past models dealing with caste fate conflict in insect societies, for example, successfully predicted that if female larvae can control their own caste fate, an excess should opt to selfishly develop as queens. Available models, however, were unable to accurately predict levels of queen production observed in Melipona bees-a genus of stingless bees where caste is self-determined-as empirically observed levels of queen production are approximately two times lower than the theoretically predicted ones. Here, we show that this discrepancy can be resolved by explicitly deriving the colony-level cost of queen overproduction from a dynamic model of colony growth, requiring the incorporation of parameters of colony growth and demography, such as the per-capita rate at which new brood cells are built and provisioned, the percentage of the queen\'s eggs that are female, costs linked with worker reproduction and worker mortality. Our revised model predicts queen overproduction to more severely impact colony productivity, resulting in an evolutionarily stable strategy that is approximately half that of the original model, and is shown to accurately predict actual levels of queen overproduction observed in different Melipona species. Altogether, this shows how inclusive fitness models can provide accurate quantitative predictions, provided that costs and benefits are modeled in sufficient detail and are measured precisely.