Emergent polyethism as a consequence of increased colony size in insect societies
Emergent polyethism as a consequence of increased colony size in insect societies
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DOI：
10.1006/jtbi.2001.2506
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发表时间：
2002-04-07
影响因子：
2
通讯作者：
Anderson, C
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Gautrais, J;Theraulaz, G;Anderson, C
在昆虫社会的阈值强化模型探讨了一系列的殖民地规模和水平的任务需求，以研究其对工人多民族主义的影响。我们发现，增加殖民地的规模，同时保持需求成正比的殖民地的大小会导致增加个体之间的分化，在他们的活动水平，从而解释了精英主义（个人做了不成比例的大部分工作）在昆虫社会的发生。当总的工作需求增加同时保持殖民地大小恒定时，获得了类似的结果。我们的模型可以再现一整套的殖民地成员之间的活动水平的分布，已经发现在实证研究。当有两个任务时，我们证明了需求和群体规模的增加会产生高度专业化的个体，但没有对工作的空间组织或个体处理不同任务的任何固有能力提出任何严格的假设。重要的是，这种专业化只发生在一个临界的殖民地大小，使较小的殖民地包含一组未分化的同样不活跃的个人，而较大的殖民地包含活跃的专家和不活跃的通才，已经发现在实证研究和预测从其他理论的考虑。(C)2002爱思唯尔科技有限公司版权所有。
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.