Living in social groups could influence the evolution of senescence and longevity by
affecting key life‐history parameters such as extrinsic mortality and the cost of reproduction …

Senescence—the decline in age‐specific contribution to fitness with increasing age—has
been widely investigated in evolutionary ecology. A tremendous amount of detailed …

Highlights•23 genomes and 38 transcriptomes have been published, and more are on the
way.•'Social chromosomes' determine colony organization independently in two …

Social insects are promising new models in aging research. Within single colonies, longevity
differences of several magnitudes exist that can be found elsewhere only between different …

The evolution of sociality in insects caused a divergence in lifespan between reproductive
and non-reproductive castes. Ant queens can live for decades, while most workers survive …

Senescence is manifested by an increase in molecular damage and a deterioration of
biological functions with age. In most organisms, body maintenance is traded-off with …

Longevity is traded off with fecundity in most solitary species, but the two traits are positively
linked in social insects. In ants, the most fecund individuals (queens and kings) live longer …

One of the central questions of ageing research is why lifespans of organisms differ so
tremendously among related taxa and, even more surprising, among members of the same …

Since the first description of a set of characteristics of aging as so-called hallmarks or pillars
in 2013/2014, these characteristics have served as guideposts for the research in aging …

Phenotypic plasticity, where a single genome can give rise to different phenotypes,
underlies many remarkable features of the natural world and occurs in a wide range of …