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The first sterile caste to evolve in termites was the soldier. While the importance of soldiers to termite society defense has long been recognized, the contribution of soldiers to other societal functions, such as colony immunity, is less well understood. We explore this issue by examining the role of soldiers in protecting nestmates against pathogen infection. Even though they are unable to engage in grooming behavior, we find that the presence of soldiers of the Darwin termite, Mastotermes darwiniensis, significantly improves the survival of nestmates following entomopathogenic infection. We also show that the copious exocrine oral secretions produced by Darwin termite soldiers contain a high concentration of proteins involved in digestion, chemical biosynthesis, and immunity. The oral secretions produced by soldiers are sufficient to protect nestmates against infection, and they have potent inhibitory activity against a broad spectrum of microbes. Our findings support the view that soldiers may play an important role in colony immunity, and broaden our understanding of the possible function of soldiers during the origin of soldier-first societies.
The first sterile caste to evolve in termites was the soldier. While the importance of soldiers to termite society defense has long been recognized, the contribution of soldiers to other societal functions, such as colony immunity, is less well understood. We explore this issue by examining the role of soldiers in protecting nestmates against pathogen infection. Even though they are unable to engage in grooming behavior, we find that the presence of soldiers of the Darwin termite, Mastotermes darwiniensis, significantly improves the survival of nestmates following entomopathogenic infection. We also show that the copious exocrine oral secretions produced by Darwin termite soldiers contain a high concentration of proteins involved in digestion, chemical biosynthesis, and immunity. The oral secretions produced by soldiers are sufficient to protect nestmates against infection, and they have potent inhibitory activity against a broad spectrum of microbes. Our findings support the view that soldiers may play an important role in colony immunity, and broaden our understanding of the possible function of soldiers during the origin of soldier-first societies.
Effective immunity is essential for maintaining insect society integrity but the mechanisms that connect immunity at the level of the individual to the level of society are poorly understood. Here, we begin to resolve this issue by addressing the interaction between individual immunity and caste identity in the termite Neotermes castaneus. We characterize the transcriptomic responses of different castes to a general immune challenge by sequencing mRNAs from false workers, soldiers and reproductive following injection with a cocktail of heat-killed pathogens. We found many more genes to be differentially regulated in reproductives (1420 and 398 genes down- and upregulated respectively) than soldiers (90 and 108 genes) or false workers (135 and 71 genes). We go on to conduct a quantitative analysis of the specific changes to immune regulation across the castes following pathogen exposure, before discussing the implications of these findings for our understanding of the evolution of immunity in eusocial termites.