PARENTAGE ANALYSES IN ANT COLONIES USING SIMPLE SEQUENCE REPEAT LOCI

In ants of the genus Myrmica, female progeny may be the offspring of o ne to several different queens. In addition, both workers and queens a re capable of producing haploid male offspring. Even in such complex c olonies, parentage can be assigned on the basis of genotypic variation at highly polymorphic simple sequence repeat loci. Methods are descri bed for isolating and screening dinucleotide repeat loci in ants. Thre e independent loci, Myrt2, Myrt3 and Myrt4, show expected heterozygosi ties of 0.94, 0.92 and 0.95, respectively. When used in parallel these loci should be sufficient to establish parentage in the vast majority of screened colonies. An initial screening indicates that males are p roduced by workers in the subalpine ant Myrmica 'near tahoensis'.