Gautrais, Jacques and Theraulaz, Guy and Deneubourg, Jean-Louis and Anderson, Carl (2002) Emergent polyethism as a consequence of increased colony size in insect societies. JOURNAL OF THEORETICAL BIOLOGY, 215 (3). pp. 363-373. ISSN 0022-5193
Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)Abstract
A threshold reinforcement model in insect societies is explored over a range of colony sizes and levels of task demand to examine their effects upon worker polyethism. We find that increasing colony size while keeping the demand proportional to the colony size causes an increase in the differentiation among individuals in their activity levels, thus explaining the occurrence of elitism (individuals that do a disproportionately large proportion of work) in insect societies. Similar results were obtained when the overall work demand is increased while keeping the colony size constant. Our model can reproduce a whole suite of distributions of the activity levels among colony members that have been found In empirical studies. When there are two tasks, we demonstrate that increasing demand and colony size generates highly specialized individuals, but without invoking any strict assumptions about spatial organization of work or any inherent abilities of individuals to tackle different tasks. Importantly, such specialization only occurs above a critical colony size such that smaller colonies contain a set of undifferentiated equally inactive individuals while larger colonies contain both active specialists and inactive generalists, as has been found in empirical studies and is predicted from other theoretical considerations. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | DIVISION-OF-LABOR; SOCIAL INSECTS; POLYBIA-OCCIDENTALIS; AGE POLYETHISM; ANT; ORGANIZATION; SPECIALIZATION; HYMENOPTERA; WORK; PRODUCTIVITY; |
| Subjects: | 500 Science > 590 Zoological sciences |
| Divisions: | Biology, Preclinical Medicine > Institut für Zoologie |
| Depositing User: | Dr. Gernot Deinzer |
| Date Deposited: | 02 Nov 2021 09:14 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Nov 2021 09:14 |
| URI: | https://pred.uni-regensburg.de/id/eprint/40387 |
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