Data from: Plastic senescence in the honeybee and the disposable soma theory

The demonstration of lifespan plasticity in natural populations would provide a powerful test of evolutionary theories of senescence. Plastic senescence is not easily explained by mutation accumulation or antagonistic pleiotropy but is a corollary of the disposable soma theory. The lifespan differences among castes of the eusocial Hymenoptera are potentially some of the most striking and extreme examples of lifespan plasticity. Although these differences are often assumed to be plastic, this has never been demonstrated conclusively because differences in lifespan may be caused by the proximate effects of different levels of environmental hazard experienced by castes. Here, age-dependent and age-independent components of instantaneous mortality rates of the honeybee (Apis mellifera) were estimated from published lifetables for natural and semi-natural populations to determine whether differences in lifespan between queens and workers and between different types workers are indeed plastic. These differences in lifespan were found to be due to differences in the rate of actuarial senescence, which correlate positively with the rate of extrinsic mortality, in accordance with the central prediction of evolutionary theories of senescence. Although all three evolutionary theories of senescence could, in principle, explain such plastic senescence, given differential gene expression between castes or life stages, only the disposable soma theory adequately explains the adaptive regulation of somatic maintenance in response to different environmental conditions that appears to underlie lifespan plasticity