Publications by authors named "M A Goodisman"
A diversity of organisms live within underground environments. However, visualizing subterranean behavior is challenging because of the opacity of most substrates. We demonstrate that laser speckle imaging, a non-invasive technique resolving nanometer-scale movements, facilitates quantifying biological activity in a granular medium.
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- - The study analyzed the genetic factors influencing morphological traits in the castes of social wasp *Vespula maculifrons*, revealing weak genetic influences on caste variation and higher heritability in queen traits compared to worker traits.
- - Despite expectations, the genetic architecture of traits exhibited similarities between queens and workers, and no significant relationship was found between caste dimorphism and correlation, challenging the idea of constraints due to genetic conflict.
- - Overall, the results indicate that environmental differences largely drive phenotypic variation among castes, suggesting that past selection on caste phenotypes has shifted the emphasis towards environmental influences.
Article Synopsis
- Many female species, including the common eastern yellowjacket wasp, engage in polyandry, leading to conflicts within social structures.
- Research on Vespula maculifrons showed significant paternal skew among colonies, affecting caste production (workers vs. queens), highlighting reproductive conflicts.
- The study also found stable patterns of polyandry over 40 years and weak links between paternity skew and the physical traits of offspring, revealing complex dynamics in gene distribution and social interaction in these wasps.
Ants are millimetres in scale yet collectively create metre-scale nests in diverse substrates. To discover principles by which ant collectives self-organize to excavate crowded, narrow tunnels, we studied incipient excavation in small groups of fire ants in quasi-two-dimensional arenas. Excavation rates displayed three stages: initially excavation occurred at a constant rate, followed by a rapid decay, and finally a slower decay scaling in time as .
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