Hamilton Award 2026: Professor Joan Strassmann

The long reach of social insect research

Research on social insects has defined our understanding of how relatives interact when their often cooperative interests nevertheless have areas of conflict. Decades of work in areas like sex allocation, worker policing, kin discrimination, parent-offspring and sibling conflict, cannibalism, and eusociality have become clear largely from careful studies with social insects. Social insects are visible, easily marked and followed, and have clear behavioral interactions. Theory first elucidated in social insects has had a great impact in other areas from genomic imprinting to selfish genetic interests to microbial interactions. My own research began with following behavioral interactions among Polistes wasps. Much later, in collaboration with David Queller, I explored the conundrum of relatedness in swarm-founding wasps with multiple queens in Venezuela, genetic relatedness among primitively eusocial wasps and queen-worker conflict in stingless bees. But it was clear that the ideas that came from the cradle of social insects had much more to tell us about the natural world. Conflicts arise within individuals and among microbes, places where they would have been hard to discover. My own research turned to a social amoeba, Dictyostelium discoideum. I have applied ideas that come from social insects to this microbial system, first looking at interactions among amoebas and then turning to their interactions with bacterial symbionts. Social insects have also motivated more conceptual explorations into topics like what it means to be an organism. Here I will explore the past and future of ideas generated from studies of social insects.

West-Eberhard Award 2026: Dr. Luisa Jaimes Niño

Non-senescing queens and the implications for the colony-level reproduction

Social insect queens break the rules in terms of energy budgeting combining long lifespans with high fertility. This can be resolved under colony-level evolution, with the optimization of the ageing and fertility of the germline over the soma. We showed that single-living queens of Cardiocondyla obscurior increase their investment into sexuals at the end of their life, and exhibit a below-average mortality until the peak of sexual production. Such delay in actuarial senescence, also found in seed-harvester ants and a termite, suggests that postponed ageing may be widespread among social insect reproductives. Supporting the delay of senescence, we find a contrasting pattern to any reported taxa: genes with middle-aged-biased expression exhibit a stronger purifying selection compared to younger-biased genes. Furthermore, we find no negative fitness effects in offspring fitness with increasing maternal age. These findings indicate that queens reproduce repeatedly while maintaining selection against senescence after sexual maturation due to late-life fitness gains. Although it remains unclear whether this mechanism is unique to superorganisms, it has broad implications for understanding healthspan, and the evolution of reproductive death. Colony-level selection also shapes the dynamics of growth, reproduction and dispersal. In polygynous species with mixed-aged queens, new colonies are founded by budding and are predominantly established by younger queens. This resembles assymmetric budding in yeast, where new cells separate with the rejuvenated genetic material, while older cells keep the accumulated DNA damage. We explore how staying or leaving a budding cohort influences colony growth and the distribution of reproductive potential within colonies.