Oct. 1, 2012
This is the first in the fall seminar series sponsored by the UC Davis Department of Entomology. Brian Johnson, assistant professor of entomology, will serve as the host for the Oct. 17 seminar. He and assistant professor Joanna Chiu are coordinating the seminars.
"Individuals in insect societies are inextricably linked by social interactions,” Linksvayer writes in his abstract. “Colony-level social networks coordinate individual function and colony homeostasis just as physiological networks coordinate tissue function and homeostasis within individuals. As a result, social insect colonies are often described as ‘superorganisms’ composed of organisms that function together more-or-less as a unit. This characteristic is thought to have led to the remarkable ecological and evolutionary success of the social insects. Despite these conspicuous superorganismal properties and the inherent hierarchical organization of life in insect societies (i.e. colony-level, organismal-level), most previous studies of the evolutionary genetic and molecular basis of social insect traits use the same reductionist approaches that have been developed for solitary organisms, where an individual’s traits are only influenced by its own genome. More realistically, in social organisms, an individual’s traits are the property of the genomes of all social group members. I will discuss ongoing integrative research studying how social interactions in ants and honey bees affect the expression and evolution of individual- and group-level traits."
Linksvayer, appointed assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 2011, received his bachelor’s degree in biology from Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, in 1998, and his doctorate in evolution, ecology and behavior from Indiana University in 2005. He did his postdoctoral work in evolutionary biology at Arizona State University from 2005 to 2008, and in social evolution from the University of Copenhagen in 2011.
Through the coordination of professor James R. Carey, this seminar will be videotaped and later posted on UCTV.
Linksvayer's publications include:
Linksvayer TA, J Fewell, J Gadau, M Laubichler. 2012. Developmental evolution in social insects: regulatory networks from genes to societies. Journal of Experimental Zoology B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution 318: 159-169.
Linksvayer TA, O Kaftanoglu, E Akyol, S Blatch, GV Amdam, RE Page Jr. 2011. Larval and nurse worker control of developmental plasticity and the evolution of honey bee queen-worker dimorphism. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 24: 1939-1948.
Linksvayer, TA, MJ Wade. 2009. Genes with social effects are expected to harbor more sequence variation within and between species. Evolution 63: 1685-1696.
Linksvayer, TA, MK Fondrk, RE Page Jr. 2009. Colony-level selection in honey bees produces coevolved socially-interacting gene complexes. American Naturalist 173: E99-E107.
Linksvayer, TA. 2006. Direct, maternal, and sibsocial genetic effects on individual and colony traits in an ant. Evolution 60: 2552-2561.
Anderson KE, D Wheeler, K Yang, TA Linksvayer. 2011. Dynamics of an ant-ant obligate mutualism: colony growth, density dependence and frequency dependence. Molecular Ecology 20: 1781-1793.
Johnson, BR, TA Linksvayer. 2010. Deconstructing the superorganism: social physiology, reproductive groundplans, and sociogenomics. The Quarterly Review of Biology 85: 57-79.
Moorad, JA, TA Linksvayer. 2008. Levels of selection on threshold traits. Genetics 179: 899-905.
Linksvayer, TA. 2007. Ant species size differences are determined by epistasis between brood and worker genomes. PLoS ONE 2: e994.
Linksvayer, TA, MJ Wade. 2005. The evolutionary origin and maintenance of eusociality in the aculeate Hymenoptera: maternal effects, sib-social effects, and heterochrony. The Quarterly Review of Biology 80: 317-336.
Upcoming seminar speakers are:
Oct. 24: Micky Eubanks, professor, Texas A&M University
Title: "Community Ecology of a "Pest": Aphids Rule their World via Powerful Indirect Effects"
Host: Graduate student Billy Kimmel
Oct. 30: Sarjeet Gill, professor, UC Riverside
Title: "Bacterial Toxins in Disease Mosquito Vector Control"
Host: Bruce Hammock, distinguished professor of entomology
Nov. 7: Taro Ohkawa, postdoctoral researcher, UC Berkeley
Title: "Baculovirus Manipulation of the Host Actin Cytoskeleton: Roles in Entry and Egress"
Host: George Kamita from the Bruce Hammock lab
Nov. 14: No seminar this week (Entomological Society of America)
Nov. 28: James Mallet, professor, Harvard University
Title: "Hybridization, Mimicry and the Origin of Species in Heliconius Butterflies"
Host: Gregory Lanzaro, professor, UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine
Dec. 5: Leigh Alumni Seminar (time and site to be announced).
Marc Tatar, professor, Brown University
Title: "Integrated Control of Drosophila Aging by Insulin/IGF Signaling"
Host: James R. Carey, professor of entomology
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894