Specialization and Coordination of Individuals in a Complex Activity

群居昆虫的一般规则是，群居成员专门从事群居生长、防御和繁殖所需的不同任务。以前大多数关于工人分工的研究都局限于对“种姓”水平的分析，“种姓”指的是长期扮演某一特定角色的工人群体。然而，最近的一些证据表明，种姓个体成员之间的行为差异可能对群体组织的运作起到不可或缺的作用。珍妮博士的研究将对群居昆虫群体中的工作组织进行分析，深入到个体层面。总体目标是理解群体对意外事件的反应是如何与个体工蚁的反应组合在一起的，这些意外事件在全球层面上看起来是确定性的(确定的)，而个体工蚁的反应似乎是特殊的和概率的。珍妮博士将分析一种热带黄蜂的筑巢行为，他已经在这一物种上做了详细的前期工作。在他的总体目标中有两个目标。第一个目标是确定筑巢过程中个体变异性的特征和行为相关性。实验将在个体标记的工蚁身上进行，在社会背景下工作，以确定他们的活动水平是否与年龄有关，以及是否与不同个体对释放筑巢活动的刺激反应的阈值有关。第二个目标是对假想的调节筑巢行为的机制进行实验测试。最终的结果将是了解筑巢系统对刺激的反应、反馈途径以及参与活动的工蚁之间的沟通模式。到目前为止，我们所知道的关于群居昆虫复杂活动的协调，与西德尼·布伦纳和他的同事们关于简单生物体发育的发现是相似的，也就是说，很大程度上“组装的语法”存在于系统组成部分之间的相互作用中。为群居昆虫指定这种语法是这项研究的最终目标。

It is a general rule among social insects that colony members specialize on different tasks required for the growth, defense, and reproduction of the colony. Most previous studies of division of labor among workers have limited analysis to the level of the "caste," the group of workers performing a given role for a prolonged period of time. However, some recent evidence suggests that behavioral differences among individual members of a caste may play an integral role in how the colony organizes work. Dr. Jeanne's research will take the analysis of the organization of work in social-insect colonies down to the level of the individual. The overall goal is to understand how the colony's response to a contingency, which at the global level appears to be deterministic (certain), is put together from the responses of individual workers, which appear to be idiosyncratic and probabilistic. Dr. Jeanne will analyze nest-construction behavior of a species of tropical wasp on which he has already done detailed preliminary work. He has two objectives within his overall goal. The first objective is to determine the characteristics and behavioral correlates of individual variability in nest construction. Experiments will be conducted on individually marked workers, working within the social context, to determine if their levels of activity are related to age and to different individual thresholds of response to the stimuli that release nest-construction activities. The second objective is to experimentally test for mechanisms hypothesized to regulate nest-construction behavior. The end result will be an understanding of the nest-construction system in terms of responses to stimuli, feedback pathways, and modes of communication among workers engaged in the activity. What we know so far about the coordination of complex activities of social insects suggests a parallel with what Sydney Brenner and his associates are finding out about development in simple organisms, namely that much of the "grammar of assembly" lies in the interaction among the component parts of the system. Specifying this grammar for a social insect is the ultimate goal of this research.