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Behavioral Ecology Advance Access originally published online on May 19, 2009
Behavioral Ecology 2009 20(5):922-929; doi:10.1093/beheco/arp070
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Larger colonies do not have more specialized workers in the ant Temnothorax albipennis

Anna Dornhausa,b, Jo-Anne Holleya,c and Nigel R. Franksb

a Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, 1041 East Lowell Street, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA b University of Bristol, School of Biological Sciences, Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UG, UK c University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, School of Integrative Biology, 505 South Goodwin Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801, USA

Address correspondence to A. Dornhaus. E-mail: dornhaus{at}email.arizona.edu.


  Abstract

Social insects are distinguished by their extraordinary degree of cooperation and the complexity of their group organization. However, a high proportion of individuals (often >50% at any one time) in a social insect colony tend to be inactive. It has been hypothesized that larger colonies can afford such inactivity because of efficiencies gained through stronger division of labor. We quantify the degree to which colonies of different sizes exhibit division of labor, and what proportion tends to be inactive, in the ant Temnothorax albipennis. Colony size neither influenced individual specialization nor overall division of labor in this species and larger colonies did not show a higher proportion of inactive workers. Interestingly, small colonies seemed to rely more on a small number of high-performance workers: the proportion of work performed by the single most active worker is significantly higher in smaller colonies for several tasks. More research is needed to resolve when and how colony size affects collective organization and division of labor in insect colonies.

Key words: colony size, division of labor, scaling, self-organization, social insects, specialization, task allocation.

Received 15 December 2008; revised 17 April 2009; accepted 20 April 2009.


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