Age, caste, and social context shape ovarian morphology and transcriptomic profiles in red harvester ants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The reproductive division of labor defines eusocial insects like ants, where queens reproduce and workers remain sterile. Yet, some workers retain rudimentary ovaries, raising questions about latent reproductive potential. We examined morphological and transcriptomic differences in Pogonomyrmex barbatus queen and worker ovaries at different maturation stages and social contexts. Queens had large, yolk-rich oocytes, while worker ovaries showed regression. Callow workers (<5 days) had more developed ovaries than mature ones (>20 days), suggesting age-related regression, even without reproduction. Queenless workers exhibited greater ovarian regression than queenright ones, indicating factors beyond queen presence may limit reproductive activation. We found ~2000 caste-specific differentially expressed genes, including those involved in metabolism, hormonal signaling, and epigenetic regulation. Queenless workers upregulated a fertility-linked gene and downregulated lipid metabolism genes. Our results show that age and social environment influence ovarian state, highlighting complex regulation of reproductive suppression and offering insight into reproductive senescence in eusocial systems.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".