MATERNITY ASSIGNMENT AND QUEEN REPLACEMENT IN A SOCIAL WASP

Assigning offspring to parents is important for understanding the evol ution of reproductive conflicts and cooperation, particularly in the m odel systems represented by social insects. Molecular genetic markers are often used to exclude, and occasionally used to assign, candidate parents. However, their use in social insects has been unsatisfactory so far because candidate mothers are often highly related and candidat e fathers are unknown. Here, we show that microsatellite loci can be s cored from each mother's stored sperm permitting effective maternity a ssignment. The theoretical power of this method is huge, and we demons trate its practical utilization in this large-scale study of the wasp, Polistes annularis. All 219 genotyped daughters were either assigned to a unique mother or shown to be the progeny of an uncollected dead m other. The data reveal an unexpectedly high number of changes in repro ductive dominance. Maternity assignments using this method should help solve many difficult questions in social evolution.