Adaptive distribution of morphological specialists in social insects: New insights into the evolution of division of labor

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Division of labor occurs at all levels of biological organization: for example, cells in a multi-cellular organism just as workers in a social insect colony may specialize on particular tasks. Such specialization can lead to morphological differentiation, and thus to evolutionary innovation. What environmental or social conditions favor such specialization of components, and what system-level organization is needed to reap the benefits of such specialization? The objective of this project is to develop a new, quantitative understanding of the contribution of morphologically distinct specialists to group success. Turtle ants (Cephalotes rohweri) will be used as model system. These ants produce two types of workers, one of which is a highly specialized defense soldier with a plate-shaped head, used to block nest entrances. Because of their costs and inflexibility, the production of specialists is limited. Defense of the colony may thus crucially depend on effective allocation of specialists to the right place at the right time. The project will investigate how this dynamic allocation takes place, and thus how the ant society trades-off risk and resources; it will investigate the contribution of specialists to colony fitness; and a model will be developed to determine the optimal strategy for distributing specialists in a variable work environment. The project will thus offer new insights on important questions about the evolution of specialization. In addition, because it focuses on defense specialists, it will have implications for optimal allocation of defense resources in any system. The results of this project will serve not only to increase understanding of the evolution of specialization, but also help engineers design improved distributed problem solving algorithms, for example in collective robotics.