Summary of the characteristics of sociality in diploid and haplodiploid organisms with different mating systems
| Ploidy | Mating system | Age of social lineages | Social complexitya (Fewell and Abbot 2018) | Taxonomy range | Taxa examples |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Diploid | Strictly inbreeding (sib-mating) | Young (sociality only has full impact on selection within the past 300,000 years from this study) | Cooperative communal groups | Broad, often multiphyletic for the young social species lineages | Spiders (Agnarsson et al. 2006; Settepani et al. 2016) |
| Outcrossing | Various? (oldest can be 130 million years in termites) (Krishna et al. 2013) | Advanced eusocial, primitive eusocial, cooperative communal groups | Termites (Legendre et al. 2008; Korb and Thorne 2017), snapping shrimps (Chak and Rubenstein 2019), mole rats (Kverková et al. 2018; Faulkes and Bennett 2021), aphids (Stern 1994) | ||
| Haplodiploid | Inbreeding (sib-mating), occasionally outcrossing | Less old? (10 million years in thrips, in term of species lineage) (Abbot and Chapman 2017) | Primitive eusocial, cooperative communal groups | Limited (order Hymenoptera and Thysanoptera, tribe Xyleborini), often monophyletic for the old social species lineage | Thrips (Chapman et al. 2000), beetles (Johnson et al. 2018) |
| Outcrossing | Old (the phylogeny of ants dates back to 140–168 million years ago) (Moreau et al. 2006) | Advanced eusocial, primitive eusocial | Ants, bees, wasps |
[i] aThe social complexity is a broad qualitative summary with the terminology used for describing social diversity in insects from Fewell and Abbot (2018).