Ecological, physiological and molecular biological mechanisms integrating insect social behavior

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A major goal in biology is to understand the integrative mechanism of animal social behavior. In social aphids, altruistic individuals called "soldiers" perform colony defense and housekeeping. When the soldiers are young, they perform relatively safe tasks inside the colony such as gall cleaning. As the soldiers age, their tasks involve more dangerous outside activities such as colony defense. We investigated the ecological, physiological and molecular biological mechanisms of this age-dependent division of labor among the soldiers of a gall-forming aphid, Tuberaphis styraci, which is a model species representing social aphids.