scholarly journals Selection in the social insects

Nature ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 280 (5722) ◽  
pp. 519-520
Author(s):  
Brian Charlesworth
Keyword(s):  
Social Insects ◽  
The Social

scholarly journals Ants under crowded conditions consume more energy

2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 613-615 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tuan T Cao ◽  
Anna Dornhaus
Keyword(s):  
Metabolic Rate ◽  
Social Insects ◽  
Energy Use ◽  
Social Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cent Increase ◽  
Worker Behaviour

Social insects live in colonies consisting of many workers, where worker interactions play an important role in regulating colony activities. Workers interact within the social space of the nest; therefore, constraints on nest space may alter worker behaviour and affect colony activities and energetics. Here we show in the ant Temnothorax rugatulus that changes in nest space have a significant effect on colony energetics. Colonies with restricted nest space showed a 14.2 per cent increase in metabolic rate when compared with the same colonies in large uncrowded nests. Our study highlights the importance of social space and shows that constraints on social space can significantly affect colony behaviour and energy use in ants. We discuss the implications of our findings regarding social insects in general.

The Social Insects' Bestiary

1982 ◽  
pp. 1-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID H. KISTNER
Keyword(s):  
Social Insects ◽  
The Social

scholarly journals Rethinking recognition: social context in adult life rather than early experience shapes recognition in a social wasp

2020 ◽  
Vol 375 (1802) ◽  
pp. 20190468 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Cappa ◽  
Alessandro Cini ◽  
Lisa Signorotti ◽  
Rita Cervo
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social Insects ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Experimental Tests ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Social Wasp ◽  
Social Recognition ◽  
Sensitive Period ◽  
The Social

Social recognition represents the foundation of social living. To what extent social recognition is hard-wired by early-life experience or flexible and influenced by social context of later life stages is a crucial question in animal behaviour studies. Social insects have represented classic models to investigate the subject, and the acknowledged idea is that relevant information to create the referent template for nest-mate recognition (NMR) is usually acquired during an early sensitive period in adult life. Experimental evidence, however, highlighted that other processes may also be at work in creating the template and that such a template may be updated during adult life according to social requirements. However, currently, we lack an ad hoc experiment testing the alternative hypotheses at the basis of NMR ontogeny in social insects. Thus, to investigate the mechanisms underlying the ontogeny of NMR in Polistes wasps, a model genus in recognition studies, and their different role in determining recognition abilities, we subjected Polistes dominula workers to different olfactory experiences in different phases of their life before inserting them into the social environment of a novel colony and testing them in recognition bioassays. Our results show that workers develop their NMR abilities based on their social context rather than through pre-imaginal and early learning or self-referencing. Our study demonstrates that the social context represents the major component shaping recognition abilities in a social wasp, therefore shedding new light on the ontogeny of recognition in paper wasps and prompting the reader to rethink about the traditional knowledge at the basis of the recognition in social insects. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Signal detection theory in recognition systems: from evolving models to experimental tests'.

The economic origins of ultrasociality

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gowdy ◽  
Lisi Krall
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Social Insects ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Driving Forces ◽  
Active Management ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Resource Exploitation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Species Groups ◽  
City States

AbstractUltrasociality refers to the social organization of a few species, including humans and some social insects, having a complex division of labor, city-states, and an almost exclusive dependence on agriculture for subsistence. We argue that the driving forces in the evolution of these ultrasocial societies were economic. With the agricultural transition, species could directly produce their own food and this was such a competitive advantage that those species now dominate the planet. Once underway, this transition was propelled by the selection of within-species groups that could best capture the advantages of (1) actively managing the inputs to food production, (2) a more complex division of labor, and (3) increasing returns to larger scale and larger group size. Together these factors reoriented productive life and radically altered the structure of these societies. Once agriculture began, populations expanded as these economic drivers opened up new opportunities for the exploitation of resources and the active management of inputs to food production. With intensified group-level competition, larger populations and intensive resource exploitation became competitive advantages, and the “social conquest of Earth” was underway. Ultrasocial species came to dominate the earth's ecosystems. Ultrasociality also brought a loss of autonomy for individuals within the group. We argue that exploring the common causes and consequences of ultrasociality in humans and the social insects that adopted agriculture can provide fruitful insights into the evolution of complex human society.

scholarly journals The plasticity of lifespan in social insects

2021 ◽  
Vol 376 (1823) ◽  
pp. 20190734
Author(s):  
Jürgen Heinze ◽  
Julia Giehr
Keyword(s):  
Social Environment ◽  
Social Insects ◽  
Inclusive Fitness ◽  
Nutrient Sensing ◽  
Egg Laying ◽  
Social Traits ◽  
Short Lifespan ◽  
The Social ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
Convenient Model

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 species. Social insects provide a particularly pronounced example for this. Here, we review previously published information on lifespan plasticity in social insects and provide new data on worker lifespan in the ant Cardiocondyla obscurior , which because of its relatively short lifespan is a convenient model to study ageing. We show that individual lifespan may vary within species with several reproductive and social traits, such as egg-laying rate, queen number, task, colony size and colony composition. For example, in Cardiocondyla , highly fecund queens live longer than reproductively less active queens, and workers tend to live longer when transferred into a novel social environment or, as we show with new data, into small colonies. We hypothesize that this plasticity of lifespan serves to maximize the reproductive output of the colony as a whole and thus the inclusive fitness of all individuals. The underlying mechanisms that link the social environment or reproductive status with lifespan are currently unresolved. Several studies in honeybees and ants indicate an involvement of nutrient-sensing pathways, but the details appear to differ among species. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Ageing and sociality: why, when and how does sociality change ageing patterns?'

scholarly journals The Social Evolving: Sociogenomics on the Wings of Social Insects

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-117
Author(s):  
Sainath Suryanarayanan
Keyword(s):  
Social Behavior ◽  
Social Insects ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Social Insect ◽  
Genetic Networks ◽  
Novelty Seeking ◽  
Sequencing Technology ◽  
Computational Tools ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual

Abstract This paper excavates the epistemological and ontological foundations of a rapidly emerging field called sociogenomics in relation to the development of social insects as models of social behavior. Its center-stage is “the genome,” where social and environmental information and genetic variation interact to influence social behavior through dynamic shifts in gene expression across multiple bodies and time-scales. With the advent of whole-genome sequencing technology, comparative genomics, and computational tools for mining patterns of association across widely disparate datasets, social insects are being experimented with to identify genetic networks underlying autism, novelty-seeking and aggression evolutionarily shared with humans. Drawing on the writings of key social insect biologists, and historians and philosophers of science, I investigate how the historical development of social insect research on wasps, ants and bees shape central approaches in sociogenomics today, in particular, with regards to shifting understandings of “the individual” in relation to “the social.”

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