Fall 2001

Tuesdays 12:15  Goldwater 604

(Supported in part by the Systems Science and Engineering Research Center)

Seminar Schedule: <http://math.la.asu.edu/~tom/cognition/math+cogsched.html>

Our next meeting of the Mathematics and Cognition seminar will take place on Tuesday, November 6, at 12:15 PM in GWC 604.    Our speaker will be Root Gorelick of the Department of Biology, who will speak on joint work with Susan Bertram and Jennifer Fewell on the topic:

"Colony response to graded resource changes: an analytical model of the influence of genotype, environment, and inheritance pattern"

Abstract.
Social groups respond to environmental changes. Because they are comprised of individuals, a flexible group response requires coordination. Here we present an analytical population genetic model that integrates variable environmental resources with genetically and environmentally based variation in individual responses, using a multiple locus, rather than a quantitative genetic model. We determine whether variable colony resources combined with variation among worker phenotypes can generate known patterns of colony flexibility, allowing us to explicitly test how genetics (Mendelian versus quantitative), inheritance pattern and the phenotype’s environmental component influences group response. We found that with increasing colony resources, the shape of the colony’s response function varied between a step-wise decreasing function, and a gradually decreasing function. Shape change represents different hypotheses about how group level behavior is genetically mediated. The colony’s response function was dependent on number of loci and environmental variation. Allele number, phenotype and frequency contributed lesser effects. Comparisons of our model with empirical honey bee (Apis mellifera) data strongly indicate that worker foraging response to pollen stores is driven by one or two loci, each with dominant allelic effects. Because genetic variation in individual response is diverse across several social insect taxa, we believe our model has broad implications in explaining social group coordination.