Sayol, F;
Collado, MÁ;
Garcia-Porta, J;
Seid, MA;
Gibbs, J;
Agorreta, A;
Mauro, DS;
... Bartomeus, I; + view all
(2020)
Feeding specialization and longer generation time are associated with relatively larger brains in bees.
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
, 287
(1935)
, Article 20200762. 10.1098/rspb.2020.0762.
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Abstract
Despite their miniature brains, insects exhibit substantial variation in brain size. Although the functional significance of this variation is increasingly recognized, research on whether differences in insect brain sizes are mainly the result of constraints or selective pressures has hardly been performed. Here, we address this gap by combining prospective and retrospective phylogenetic-based analyses of brain size for a major insect group, bees (superfamily Apoidea). Using a brain dataset of 93 species from North America and Europe, we found that body size was the single best predictor of brain size in bees. However, the analyses also revealed that substantial variation in brain size remained even when adjusting for body size. We consequently asked whether such variation in relative brain size might be explained by adaptive hypotheses. We found that ecologically specialized species with single generations have larger brains-relative to their body size-than generalist or multi-generation species, but we did not find an effect of sociality on relative brain size. Phylogenetic reconstruction further supported the existence of different adaptive optima for relative brain size in lineages differing in feeding specialization and reproductive strategy. Our findings shed new light on the evolution of the insect brain, highlighting the importance of ecological pressures over social factors and suggesting that these pressures are different from those previously found to influence brain evolution in other taxa.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Feeding specialization and longer generation time are associated with relatively larger brains in bees |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1098/rspb.2020.0762 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.0762 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions. |
| Keywords: | Apoidea, brain evolution, lecticity, voltinism |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Genetics, Evolution and Environment |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10110429 |
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