Personality in social insects: How does worker personality determine colony personality?
By Noa Pinter-Wollman. 2012
119 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Social insect colonies and the workers comprising them, each exhibit consistent individual differences in behavior, also known as 'personalities'. Because the behavior of social insect colonies emerges from the actions of their workers, individual variation among workers' personality may be important in determining the variation we observe among colonies. The reproduc- tive unit of social insects, on which natural selection acts, is the colony, not individual workers. Therefore, it is important to un- derstand what mechanisms govern the observed variation among colonies. Here I propose three hypotheses that address how con- sistent individual differences in the behavior of workers may lead to consistent individual differences in the behavior of colonies: 1. Colonies differ consistently in their average of worker personality; 2. The distribution but not the average of worker personali- ties varies consistently among colonies; and 3. Colony personality does not emerge from its worker personality composition but from consistent external constraints. I review evidence supporting each of these hypotheses and suggest methods to further inves- tigate them. The study of how colony personality emerges from the personalities of the workers comprising them may shed light on the mechanisms underlying consistent individual differences in the behavior of other animals (Current Zoology 58 (4): 580−588, 2012).
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1eac8f5284afc4428fc73e2a1e38d33a72c2aa5e
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
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Citations in the corpus
- Linking levels of personality: personalities of the ‘average’ and ‘most extreme’ group members predict colony-level personality (2013, background): “These metrics correspond to two hypothesized relationships between individual- and colony-level personality traits in the social insect literature (Pinter-Wollman 2012; Jandt et al. 2013).”