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    A Society of Individuals: Worker Differentiation and Collective Behavior in Social Insects

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    Author
    Leitner, Nicole Elise
    Issue Date
    2019
    Keywords
    Animal behavior
    Division of labor
    Response threshold
    Social insects
    Advisor
    Dornhaus, Anna
    
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Publisher
    The University of Arizona.
    Rights
    Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction, presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.
    Embargo
    Release after 01/14/2020
    Abstract
    Individuals are not identical. Organisms of the same species usually exhibit diverse phenotypes, a phenomenon that extends not only to physical characteristics but to behavior as well. Indeed, consistent differences in behavior across individuals are now well cited across the animal kingdom and have been shown to be an integral part of the ecology and evolution of an organism. Yet, the proximate, physiological mechanisms upon which natural selection might act to either favor or eliminate variation is often not known. Here, I use social insect division of labor – essentially an exaggerated form of behavioral variation in which nestmate workers specialize in different tasks – as a study system for exploring potential neural mechanisms of inter-individual behavioral variation. This investigation also led me to test and review one of the most widely accepted hypotheses for division of labor, the results of which provide new and important insights into how and why social insect workers choose different tasks. In my first chapter I explored variation among Temnothorax rugatulus ant workers in their peripheral sensory organs, a potentially important, but often overlooked, source of behavioral variation (or, in the context of social insects, task specialization). The idea for this study was based on the popular “response threshold” mechanism for division of labor, whereby workers become specialized in tasks because they vary in their response (often assumed to be ‘sensitivity’) to task-associated stimuli. Potentially, variation in worker sensory organs might influence a worker’s ability to detect such work-associated stimuli. Though workers showed considerable variation in the number of antennal sensory structures, this variation was not related to variation in worker behavior. This led to my second chapter, in which I directly tested the response threshold hypothesis in T. rugatulus ants. Here, I found no evidence for individual variation in response thresholds to three different putative task stimuli, calling into question the ubiquity of this mechanism as a general driver of social insect division of labor. To follow up on this idea, in my third chapter I performed a comprehensive review of the response threshold hypothesis in the social insect literature and found that the empirical evidence for it is not as strong as is commonly assumed. This chapter also provides guidelines for how to test response thresholds, with the goal of becoming a valuable reference work for those studying both social insects and self-organization in complex systems in general. My last chapter scaled up to the colony level. I explored plasticity and constraint in task reallocation by challenging colonies of T. rugatulus with different types of perturbations. By considering multiple types of tasks, this study provided novel insight into how the variety of tasks a colony performs are regulated quite differently. Here, I found that colonies were able to achieve considerable flexibility through the use of two different strategies. Which strategy the colony used was task-dependent. In addition, colonies appeared to have two types of reserve workers upon which to draw when task needs increased, dependent on task type.
    Type
    text
    Electronic Dissertation
    Degree Name
    Ph.D.
    Degree Level
    doctoral
    Degree Program
    Graduate College
    Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
    Degree Grantor
    University of Arizona
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