CONTENT - International Society of Zoological Sciences

S16 ICZ2008 - Abstracts
From individual to social behaviour: ant colonies as complex
systems
Ana Sendova-Franks
School of Mathematical Sciences, CEMS, University of the West of
England, Bristol, Frenchay Campus, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol
BS16 1QY, UK
Ant colonies have appealed to our imaginations and challenged
our comprehension for hundreds of years. Today they feature in
the World Wide Web encyclopedia, Wikipedia, as one of the
classic examples of a complex system. However, we are only
beginning to understand how ant colonies are organised. It is still
not widely appreciated that social insects in general and ant
colonies in particular represent a prime model experimental
system for studying complexity for three main reasons. First, there
is an evolutionary link between individual and society where the
individual has a relatively high degree of independence. Second,
both levels of organization are relatively tractable experimentally.
Third, we can explore whether individual complexity plays a crucial
role. This is a key topical example of how zoology transcends
solely the study of animals and links with general theory and
application, in this case our understanding of how the multiple
interactions between entities at one organizational level (microlevel)
influence the behaviour at a higher or macro-level. My
presentation will be based on phenomena such as the division of
labour, worker Spatial Fidelity Zones inside the nest, brood sorting,
building, the improvement of collective performance with
experience and the distribution of food. All have been studied
through experimental manipulation and the meticulous study of the
behaviour of individuals within their societies in colonies of the ant
Temnothorax albipennis - a species that is particularly amenable to
studies attempting to link phenomena at the colony (macro-) level
to behaviour at the individual (micro-) level.
- 56 -
Altruist in insect societies and beyond: voluntary or enforced?
Tom Wenseleers
Laboratory of Entomology, Zoological Institute, Katholieke
Universiteit Leuven,
The extreme altruism of the social insect worker caste has puzzled
researchers for decades. Inclusive fitness theory suggests that
close relatedness has been key in promoting such altruism.
Recent theory, however, shows that the intermediate levels of
relatedness found within insect societies are too low to directly
cause the extreme altruism observed in many species. Instead,
recent results show that workers are frequently “coerced” into
acting altruistically. For example, workers are deterred from laying
eggs by egg killing, and female larvae are prevented from
developing into queens by food control. This shows that the
altruism seen in many modern-day insect societies may not be
voluntary but enforced. In this talk I will argue that enforced
cooperation in fact is a widespread phenomenon, that occurs not
just in insect societies, but also in social vertebrates, humans and
interspecific mutualisms.
F.L.W. Ratnieks & T. Wenseleers (2008) Altruism in insect
societies and beyond: voluntary or enforced? Trends in Ecology
and Evolution 23: 45-52.
T. Wenseleers & F.L.W. Ratnieks (2006) Enforced altruism in
insect societies. Nature 444: 50.