Symposia Abstract

Oral Presentations

Poster Presentations

Symposia Group 1 - Genomics of Social Insects

Symposium 1.1 - The concept of epigenetics and its applicability to the study of social insects
Speakers	Abstract
Jack Howe	Is worker reproduction in Acromyrmex leaf-cutting ants affected by genomic imprinting?
Paul Hurd	The epigenetic basis of nutrition-mediated caste identity in the honey bee
Boris Yagound	Is worker reproduction influenced by sperm-specific DNA methylation in the honey bee?
Nicholas Myles Allen Smith	Genomic Imprinting in South African honey bees
Thiago da Silva Depintor	Differential expression of developmental genes in response to the morphogenetic hormones in Apis mellifera
Romain Libbrecht	Epigenetic regulation of circadian rhythm in ants
Elizabeth Jenness Duncan	Genome organisation and response to queen mandibular pheromone in the honeybee (Apis mellifera).
Kenji Matsuura	Genomic imprinting drives the evolution of termite eusociality

Symposium 1.2 - Evolutionary co–option and "Ground Plan" revisited by current physiology and genomics
Speakers	Abstract
Adria C. LeBoeuf	Molecular evolution of juvenile hormone esterase-like proteins in a socially exchanged fluid
Alexander Raymond Walton	Starve a Worker, Feed a Colony: Nutrition, ovary size, and cooperation in social insect societies
Isobel Ronai	The mechanistic, genetic and evolutionary basis of worker sterility in the social Hymenoptera
Keigo Uematsu	Evolution of a sterile soldier caste by heterochronic expression of seasonal polyphenism in social aphids
Kiyoto Maekawa	Evolution of sterile caste in termites: missing link between the functions of JH and ecdysone
Zilá L. P. Simões	The genome of the eusocial Frieseomelitta varia stingless bee: a model species for reproductive dominance studies
Ken Sasaki	Biogenic amines and division of labor in eusocial Hymenoptera
Graham J Thompson	Soldier-biased gene expression in a termite implies indirect selection for defense
Michael R Warner	Comparative transcriptomics of caste development across multiple origins of eusociality
Yasukazu Okada	Rapid modification of nutrition-related genes in response to social rank in monomorphic queenless ant.

Symposium 1.3 - Genome editing in social insects
Speakers	Abstract
Thomas D. P. Hart	Generation of transgenic lines using piggyBac transposons in the clonal raider ant
Rong Ma	Heritable gene editing by targeted delivery of Cas9 nuclease to the germline in bumble bees (Bombus impatiens)
Alexis Hill	Progress towards a universal CRISPR/Cas9-depedent strategy to create genetically encoded tools for neuroethological studies in insects
Martin Beye	Genetic Technologies in honeybees
Hiroki Kohno	Production of mKast mutatnt drones and heterozygote mutant workers by genome editing using CRISPR/Cas9
John Wang	Development of CRISPR/Cas9 mutagenesis and transgenics in the fire ant
Luigi Pontieri	Developmental staging scheme of the ant Monomorium pharaonis: a potential new model for developmental biology
Waring Trible	CRISPR/Cas9-based genome editing in social insects: practical considerations and future directions

Symposium 1.4 - From genes to societies
Speakers	Abstract
Tim Gernat	Reduced trophallactic activity in response to virus infection in automatically monitored honeybee colonies
Anete Pedro Lourenço	Genes and genetic pathways in bees: from solitary to social behavior
Amro Zayed	Studying the genetics of colony-level traits using GWAS in honey bees (Apis mellifera)
Amy L. Toth	Polistes wasps: a model genus for social evolution in the genomic era
Kohei Oguchi	Juvenile hormone action inducing neotenic differentiation in the damp-wood termite
Hua Yan	Generating genetic tools in ants to study behavior and neural development
Martin Beye	Genetic instruction of behaviors in honeybees?
Laurent	The origin of sex chromosomes in fire ants
Natalia de Souza Araujo	Unveiling the expression dynamics of genes involved in bee sociality
Waring Trible	Frequency-dependent selection of a recently derived social parasite in the clonal raider ant

Symposium 1.5 - From Omics to functionality in non–model social insects
Speakers	Abstract
Alexander Mikheyev	Parallel evolution of invasive ant populations
Rajbir Kraur	Attack or no Attack - Gene expression of host during slavemaker defence depends on success of parasite population not on parasite prevalence of host
Yannick Wurm	Brain gene expression response to pesticide exposure indicates effects on cognition.
Fontana Silvia	The role of gene duplication in the evolution of the fire ant social chromosome
Eckart Stolle	Genetic mapping in the genomics era - the unusual genetic architecture of thelytokous reproduction in honeybees
Pepijn Wilhelmus Kooij	Genome assembly of the fungus Leucoagaricus gongylophorus cultivated by the ant Atta colombica using long-read MinION sequences
Alexander Paul	Screening for neuropeptide modulators of nursing and foraging behavior in the clonal raider ant
Ann Kathrin Huylmans	Sex Chromosome Evolution in Termites with Different Social Complexities
Elizabeth Cash	Functional genetic study of chemical recognition systems in Argentine ants

Symposium 1.6 - GAGA and beyond: Advances, challenges and impact of large–scale genomic comparisons in social insects
Speakers	Abstract
Laurent Keller	Comparative genomics of 65 ant species, covering all subfamilies
Evelien Jongepier	Do slavemaker ants lose perception?: Convergent loss of olfactory receptors along independent origins of slavery
Bastian Heimburger	Speciation in the Australian Amitermes Group: First insights from molecular genomics
Jack Oliver Beresford	Patterns of speciation in the transcriptomes of hybridizing wood ants: searching for the perfect hybrid
Bitao Qiu	Comparative transcriptomics reveals the ancestral brain gene-network regulating caste differentiation in ants
Emeline Favreau	Are supergenes required for intra-specific variation of social organisation?
Francisco Hita Garcia	ANTSCAN and 3D ants: the connection of phenotypes with genotypes through next-generation phenomics
Mark Christian Harrisonn	Identification of gene co-expression networks linked to differential ageing in insects
Sean K McKenzie	Comparative genomics of ant chemosensation: insights into the genomic evolution of sociality
Judith Korb	Termitomics: insights into termites’ social evolution

Symposium 1.7 - Open Session - Genomics of social insects
Speakers	Abstract
Gyan Harwood	Vitellogenin’s gene regulatory role in honey bee division of labor.
Tobias Weichselgartner	Vasa: A marker to study larval queen/worker differentiation in the ant Cardiocondyla obscurior
Jens Van Eeckhoven	What can a solitary bee tell us about the evolution of reproductive constraint in honeybees?
Joan Theresa King	Differential expression analysis of Nylanderia fulva workers and queens under varying dietary treatments
Mariana Velasque	Doublesex regulates reproductive division of labour in honey bees
Guy Bloch	Social and molecular regulation of size-related division of labor in the bumblebee Bombus terrestirs
Lauren Mee	Investigating Patterns of Selection in Immune-Responsive Genes across Anthophila
Priscila Karla Ferreira dos Santos	The genome of the solitary bee Tetrapedia diversipes
David Henry Collins	Gene expression and larval caste differentiation in social and socially parasitic bumble bees

Symposia Group 2 - Neurobiology, Communivation and Behavior

Symposium 2.1 - Information use in social insects
Speakers	Abstract
Daniel Charbonneau	Adjusting the flow of information within colonies; how inactives affect interaction networks
Talia Borofsky	Hive minded: like neurons, honeybees collectively integrate inhibitory stop signals to efficiently regulate forager recruitment
Gabriele Valentini	Information transfer during tandem-running behavior of the ant Temnothorax rugatulus: Time scales of leadership?
Tanya Latty	Putting it all together: how ants colonies and slime mould amoebas solve multi-criteria decision problems
Marine Lehue	How does the number of nest entrances influence recruitment and collective foraging in ants?
David Sillam-Dussès	Termites forage along polarized trails
Flavio Roces	Environmental and social cues: individual decisions during the construction of ventilation turrets in leaf-cutting ants
Christoph Grüter	Dancing in the dark: honeybees forage more successfully without the “dance language” in a human-modified environment
Nobuaki Mizumoto	Pair-forming termites alternate search modes adaptively depending on the informational contexts.
Ofer Feinerman	Managing information over multiple organizational scales
Takao Sasaki	Social learning and cumulative cultural evolution in the house-hunting ant, Temnothorax albipennis
Masayuki Hayashi	Tetramorium tsushimae ants transfer information about a mutualistic aphid via trophallaxis
Asaf Gal	The underlying dynamics of collective responses to external cues in clonal raider ant colonies
Helen McCreery	A comparative approach to cooperative transport: disregarding potentially distracting information can be good
Kazuki Tsuji	Decision making of ants in heterogeneous environments in relation to monodomy and polydomy
Hannah Marti	Collective memory of learned foraging preferences persists across worker turnover in a tropical leafcutter ant
Mathieu Lihoreau	Sight-reading the flight(s) of the bumblebee
Stephanie Wendt	Relative Value Perception in ants

Symposium 2.2 - Social and complex forms of learning in social insects
Speakers	Abstract
Morgane Nouvian	Towards automated conditioning of honeybees in complex tasks
Chelsea Cook	Variation in learning shapes foraging behavior in Honey Bees
Martin Giurfa	Good at simple, good at complex: proficiency is maintained across elemental and higher-order visual learning tasks in an insect
Theo Mota	Bimodal patterning discrimination in harnessed honey bees
Volker Nehring	Associative learning of recognition templates
Lisa Joanne Evans	How intra-colony differences in bumble bee learning ability influences their foraging choices
Fernando Locatelli	Competing aversive and appetitive memories in the crab Neohelice and in honey bees
CHOLE Hanna	Social contact acts as appetitive reinforcement and supports associative learning in honeybees (Apis mellifera)
Hiroyuki Ai	How do the honeybees learn waggle dance?

Symposium 2.3 - Neuroethology of the hive mind: Ecological and evolutionary context of social insect brains
Speakers	Abstract
Jean-Christophe SANDOZ	Marked inter-specific differences in the male olfactory system of honey bees (genus Apis)
Rebekah Keating Godfrey	Rethinking brain evolution in social insects: harnessing perspectives into a new predictive framework
Floria Mora-Kepfer Uy	Plasticity and differential brain investment between a social parasite wasp and its host
Michael Sheehan	Recent evolution of increased social intelligence via strong selection
Daniel Kronauer	Chemosensory processing in the ant brain
Dustin R. Rubenstein	The evolution and structure of complex societies: lessons from snapping shrimp
Natacha Rossi	Formic acid improves nestmate recognition in carpenter ants
Ken Tan	Honey bee queens have exceptional learning and long-term memory abilities
J. Frances Kamhi	Knowing where you’re going: the role of the mushroom body in ant visual navigation
Tyler Quigley	Bringing the honeybee blood-brain barrier into focus
Christopher M. Jernigan	Why bees may stop to smell the flowers: How olfactory restriction affects odor signaling in the honey bee, Apis mellifera
Marc Seid	Brain allometry and the evolution and behavioral ecology of Myrmecia
Fabio Manfredini	The molecular basis for waggle dance communication in the honey bee Apis mellifera
Ajay Narendra	Action in dim light: sensory and neural adaptations in nocturnal ants
Martin Giurfa	Learning modifies reinforcement sensitivity in honeybees via long-term changes in a dopaminergic receptor gene
PIQUERET Baptiste	Individual appetitive associative memory in Formica fusca ants is extraordinarily persistent and resistant to extinction
Yuri Ogawa	The function of ocelli in Hymenopterans: Spectral and Polarization sensitivity
Sandra Rehan	Genes, Brain and Behavior of Ceratina Small Carpenter Bees and the Evolution of Early Insect Societies

Symposium 2.4 - Chemical mechanisms underlying inter–caste communication
Speakers	Abstract
Edward Lind Vargo	Identification of a queen and king recognition pheromone in the subterranean termite, Reticulitermes flavipes
Callum Kingwell	Chemical fertility signaling in a flexibly eusocial insect
Cintia Akemi Oi	The royal pheromones of wasp colonies
Robert Kenneth Vander Meer	Chemicals passed from fire ant males to females during mating have multiple functions that enhance colony foundation success
Alison Mcafee	Death pheromones triggering hygienic behaviour in honey bees (Apis mellifera)
Christoph Johannes Kleineidam	Adaptive resource defense and experience-dependent nestmate recognition in ants
Yuki Mitaka	Multifunctionality of soldier pheromone in a termite
Fabio Nascimento	Queen pheromones did not inhibit reproduction but maintain social cohesion in an Orchid bee
Margarita Orlova	Effect of immune challenge on production of queen pheromones in the honeybee

Symposium 2.5 - Adaptation and plasticity of behaviour in social insects
Speakers	Abstract
Nicolas Châline	Individual learning and colony interactions shape the foraging ecology of a solitarily foraging ponerine ant
Daniel Elsner	Genes underlying division of labour in workers in a termite
Fiona Nelima Mumoki	Reproductive plasticity in workers of the African honey bee Apis mellifera capensis
James Martin Withrow	Sharing the Throne: Induced polygyny in honey bees (Apis mellifera)
Sofia Bouchebti	Protein to carbohydrate ratio in the diet affects cognitive abilities in honey bees
Stefanie Neupert	Megalomyrmex social parasite ants manage peace with their host through weaponry
Ebi Antony George	Regulation of individual differences in the waggle dance activity of honey bee foragers
James C Makinson	Lost in translation: interspecies waggle dance communication in Asian honeybees
Markus Thamm	Genes underlying social organisation in honeybees
Nicole Leitner	Plasticity and constraint in task allocation: How and why do workers take on new tasks?
Simon Klein	Lifetime variation in the foraging performance of individual honey bees
Samuel Vieira Boff	Behavioral change induced by pesticide may prevent workers from intoxication
Christian Pirk	Plasticity in the mandibular gland signals of honey bees
Abdullahi Ahmed Yusuf	Pheromonal plasticity of minor and major workers in the African termite raiding ant Megaponera analis (Latr.)
Matina Donaldson-Matasci	What honey bees love about large plants: individual and colony perspectives
Daniela Römer	Plasticity in the construction of nest turrets in the leaf-cutting ant Acromyrmex fracticornis
Olabimpe Okosun	Use of diverse glandular sources for pheromonal control by reproductively dominant honeybee workers
Eleanor Drinkwater	How does individual personality modulate group level behaviour?
Ken-ichi Harano	Nectar carried from the hive: adaptive significance of using concentrated nectar in honeybee pollen collection

Symposia Group 3 - Social Evolution and Sociobiology

Symposium 3.1 - Causes and consequences of division of labour in insect societies
Speakers	Abstract
Yuko Ulrich	Group composition, division of labor and fitness in the clonal raider ant
Martin Quque	Division of labour in the black garden ant (Lasius niger) leads to three distinct proteomes
Daniel Kronauer	Division of labor in the clonal raider ant: from molecules to behavior
Susanne Foitzik	The role of gene expression and regulation in altering social cue responsiveness and division of labor in Temnothorax ants
Lior Baltiansky	Flexibility without plasticity: individual crop loads locally govern collective food intake regulation in Camponotus sanctus colonies
Noa Pinter-Wollman	Nest architecture, communication networks, and the organization of work in ant colonies
Anna Dornhaus	The ecology of task allocation: costs and benefits of different algorithms
Raghavendra Gadagkar	Reproductive and non-reproductive division of labour in laboratory colonies of a primitively eusocial wasp
Bertrand Collignon	Divison of labor applied to cooperative foraging by ants and robots

Symposium 3.2 - Evolution of social organization
Speakers	Abstract
Anindita Brahma	Current indirect fitness and future direct fitness are not incompatible
Timothy Linksvayer	Prospects for using comparative genomics to elucidate the evolution of eusociality
Sanja Maria Hakala	Selfish Progeny of Great Societies - dispersal and supercoloniality in Formica ants
Madison Sankovitz	Reproductive partitioning in polygynous, perennial Vespula pensylvanica colonies
Jacobus Boomsma	Monogamous sperm storage and permanent worker sterility in a long-lived ambrosia beetle
Etya Amsalem	The origin of castes in social insects: examining the diapause ground plan hypothesis in bumblebees
Mackenzie R Lovegrove	Evolving Eusociality: Using Drosophila to understand how queen pheromone inhibits reproduction in Apis mellifera workers
Eckart Stolle	Early evolution and structure of a young supergene governing social behavior
Miriam Richards	Social trait correlations and phylogenetic patterns in sweat bees

Symposium 3.3 - Does social insect biology need superorganisms?
Speakers	Abstract
Luis Alberto Martínez Vaquero	Value-sensitive collective decision making under an evolutionary game theory perspective
Dominic Burns	Why are some ant colonies polydomous?
Helder Hugo dos Santos	From random to coordinated collective motion in termites
Boris H. Kramer	Long live the queen: eusociality and the evolutionary theory of ageing
Paul John Eggleton	Drawing the line: the problems of termites and superorganismality
Ulrich G. Mueller	Social insects and their diverse colony organizations elucidate principles of microbiome-inheritance, differential microbiome-cycling, and microbiome-engineering
Jacobus J. Boomsma	Superorganismality as defined by Wheeler is crucial for understanding major evolutionary transitions to caste-differentiated colonies
Sabrina Amador-Vargas	Democracy dilemma: (dis)advantages of having several individuals deciding about a solitary task.

Symposium 3.4 - Social evolution and life history consequences
Speakers	Abstract
Vikram Chandra	Insulin signalling regulates clonal raider ant reproductive cycles
José Manuel Monroy Kuhn	Gene expression differences underlying aging in the termite Cryptotermes secundus: a long-run time series study
Patrick Kennedy	Altruism in fluctuating environments
Matteo, Antoine Negroni	Queen longevity involves changes in expression of genes of multiple pathways in Temnothorax rugatulus
Jenny Louise Donelan	Determinants of the fecundity-longevity association in social and non-social insects
Natalie J. Lemanski	The strength of selection on worker mortality predicts seasonal differences in honeybee worker senescence rate
Violette Chiara	What triggers the decline of social tolerance in solitary spiders?
Julia Giehr	Direct fitness of workers in a Temnothorax ant
Yves Roisin	Why does asexual queen succession accommodate balanced alate sex ratio in neotropical soil-feeding termites?
Anna Friedel	Extended maternal care enhances brood survival and may be a precursor to sociality in the orchid bee Euglossa viridissima

Symposium 3.5 - Causes and consequences of morphological variation in social insect workers
Speakers	Abstract
Romain Honorio	Role of social environment in the control of larval development
Michael Rivera	Body size evolution and diversification in ants (Formicidae)
Sara Arganda Carreras	Division of labor in darkness and in light: adaptive visual system evolution in Atta cephalotes
Francisca Segers	Colony demography adapts to parasite pressure in a polymorphic bee
Jean-Philippe Lessard	The geography of ant morphology: within colony and across populations
Mari West	What’s size got to do with it? Investigating associations between size and worker task
Jake Robert Tully	The effect of environment complexity on colony level flower constancy in a semi-natural environment
Evan Patrick Kelemen	The comparative advantage of worse workers in bumble bee colonies
Christian PEETERS	Convergent evolution of a stronger but leaner flightless thorax in workers across ant subfamilies
Christina L. Kwapich	The non-additive effects of body size on nest architecture in a polymorphic ant, Veromessor pergandei

Symposium 3.6 - Open Session - Social evolution and sociobiology
Speakers	Abstract
Thomas Owen Richardson	Social insects modulate their behaviour according to caste and spatial context
Mathilde Vidal	Royal matchmaking: ant workers promote outbreeding by their sexual sisters by transporting them to alien nests
Naoto Idogawa	Social and genetic structure of Monomorium triviale, a clonal ant with queen-worker dimorphism
Sheina Koffler	Selection of male traits in a monogamous social bee: evidences from behavior and quantitative genetics
Pierre Blacher	Alternative colony-founding strategies in the Alpine silver ant
Karen Meusemann	Why do social insect queens live so long? Workers take on the queen’s burdens
Sruthi Unnikrishnan	Age polyethism in the tropical primitively eusocial wasp, Ropalidia cyathiformis
Tomonari Nozaki	Queen-destined parthenogenetic daughters as a preadaptation for asexual queen succession in termites
Robin J. Southon	Male paper wasps are not just flying sperm

Symposia Group 4 - Health and Immunity

Symposium 4.1 - 20 years since ‘Parasites in Social Insects’ – where have we travelled and what does the future hold?
Speakers	Abstract
Paul Schmid-Hempel	Parasites in social insects: from sparse beginnings to a key issue
Arran J Folly	The effect of caffeine on the epidemiology of Nosema bombi a detrimental bumblebee parasite
Maéva Angélique TECHER	Understanding successful host switches of honeybee Varroa mites using whole genome sequencing and population genomics
Natalie Imirzian	Foraging dynamics in sniper alley
Rebeca B. Rosengaus	Termites as an (often neglected) outgroup in ecological immunology studies
Sylvia Cremer	Social immunity – the immune system of the superorganism?
Sina Metzler	Pathogen-mediated sexual selection in ants
Christoph Kurze	Social networks and disease transmission

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