Novel approach to heritability detection suggests robustness to paternal genotype in a complex morphological trait

Heritable variation is essential for evolution by natural selection. In Neotropical army ants, the ecological role of a given species is linked intimately to the morphological variation within the sterile worker caste. Furthermore, the army ant Eciton burchellii is highly polyandrous, presenting a unique opportunity to explore heritability of morphological traits among related workers sharing the same colonial environment. In order to exploit the features of this organismal system, we generated a large genetic and morphological dataset and applied our new method that employs geometric morphometrics (GM) to detect the heritability of complex morphological traits. After validating our approach with an existing dataset of known heritability, we simulated our ability to detect heritable variation given our sampled genotypes, demonstrating the method can robustly recover heritable variation of small effect size. Using this method, we tested for genetic caste determination and heritable morphological variation using genetic and morphological data on 216 individuals of E. burchellii. Results reveal this ant lineage (1) has the highest mating frequency known in ants, (2) demonstrates no paternal genetic caste determination, and (3) suggests a lack of heritable morphological variation in this complex trait associated with paternal genotype. We recommend this method for leveraging the increased resolution of GM data to explore and understand heritable morphological variation in nonmodel organisms.