Variation in social organization and supergene control along a latitudinal gradient
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Widespread species often experience vastly different environmental conditions across their range. In species with polymorphic traits under strong genetic control, we can investigate how environmental variation influences the distribution of traits and whether the strength of genetic control is consistent across environmental gradients. Here, we investigate the distribution of phenotypic and genetic variation in the ant Formica podzolica across 30 degrees of latitude. This species shares a supergene that is associated with colony queen number and colony sex ratio with other congeners, but we detect a surprising six common supergene variants. Colonies with a single queen are more abundant in the north compared to those with multiple queens, although the queen number polymorphism is present throughout the range. In parallel, the frequency of supergene haplotypes also varies with latitude. Of the 170 colonies examined, 10.6% contained supergene haplotypes that did not match the queen number phenotype. The highest concentration of these 'mismatched' colonies occurred in one site, raising the possibility that the environmental conditions there override supergene function. While the supergene system in F. podzolica is complex, this species holds promise for understanding how an ancient supergene system evolves in a single species experiencing highly variable environmental conditions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".