Eusociality in haplodiploid species

created by Krishna Anand, class of 2019

Haploidiploidy has a different effect on relatedness in a population than scientists studying diploid organisms like mammals may be used to. The model organism commonly used to discuss haplodiploidy and eusociality is the sweat bee Augochlorella aurata, although many insects in the order Hymenoptera can be haplodiploid and eusocial.

Tinbergen's 4 Questions were established long before many popular techniques for studying animal behavior were discovered. In 2013, Patrick Bateson and Kevin Laland published a revision of Tinbergen's questions, which while conserving what was new and interesting about the original questions reframed them in a way that can be more easily applied. I have used these questions while researching eusociality because I believed they would lead me to unexpected insights.

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