Whether natural selection acts on parents to control the sex of offspring they produce is an important question in evolutionary biology. Perhaps the most extreme example of parental control over offspring sex occurs in colonies of ants. Individual colonies will often produce hundreds of individuals of a single sex. The reasons for such specialization remain unknown. This project tests alternative hypotheses proposed to explain specialization in production of the sexes by ants. Determining the conditions under which colonies produce one sex vs. the other may also have practical applications in controlling reproductive potential of pest species.
