9/ Huge thanks to @adriatica.bsky.social for her guidance and to all the friends whose invaluable discussions shaped this paper! 🙌
And a special shoutout to François Brassard for the stunning photos. 📸
So excited to see my Master’s research published! 🎉🐜

8/ Our study provides a macroevolutionary perspective on caste determination, offering insights into how ants became the ecological engineers we know today.
📖 Read the full study in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas....
Need access? Reach out, and we’ll be happy to send you the full text!

7/ Take-home message:
The evolution of strong caste differences and complex ant societies wasn’t just about colony size or genetics—it was about who fed the larvae and how! 🍽️👶

6/ This shift in developmental control mirrors key transitions in evolution, such as the emergence of multicellular life, where individual cells lost autonomy to function as part of a larger organism! 🤯 🐜🐜🐜=🦠🦠🦠

5/ Our causal models suggest:
🔹 More controlled feeding of larvae = More morphological specialization
🔹 Adult-controlled feeding enabled extreme caste differences, which in turn reinforced colony-level social complexity.

4/ Why does larval feeding matter?
Larvae are inherently *unruly*, trying to secure as much food as possible from the colony. By taking full control of larval nutrition, adult ants were able to sculpt extreme queen-worker differences, fueling higher social complexity.

3/Using comparative phylogenetic methods, we identified a major evolutionary shift:
The transition from self-feeding larvae to passive larvae receiving processed food from adults facilitated greater queen-worker differentiation, larger colonies, and increased social complexity. 🎯

2/ We digitized larval morphology for 700+ ant species, measured caste dimorphism in nearly 400 species, and compiled data on diets, larval feeding behaviors, and social traits across ant diversity.

1/ Ant colonies function as superorganisms—queens reproduce while workers handle all other tasks. But why do some ant species have highly specialized castes, while others have queens and workers that look nearly identical? 🤔 We figured that the key had to be in larvae!