Causes and consequences of inter-individual variability in social insects
Final Report Abstract
I have shown that bumblebees are able to assess the effect of their own fanning behavior on a brood temperature stimulus, and that they use this information to adjust their behavior; an exciting and novel finding for a non-foraging task in social insects. The results of this study support the idea that effective individuals become more fixed on a task and ineffective individuals tend to switch to other task; and that task efficiency feedback may play an important and largely overlooked role in the behavioral differentiation of workers in a colony. I have also shown that social environment strongly modulates the individual response behavior of workers and the behavioral differentiation among the workers in a group, in such a way that groups are able to maintain a stable group-level investment into a task, more or less independently of how the group is composed. This extremely high degree of individual plasticity underlying a consistent group-level pattern begs further investigation into the mechanisms of social modulation that are at work within social groups. Finally, using survival analysis, I have investigated the short-term response patterns of thermoregulating bumblebees; and have suggested an improved model that explicitly takes timing of behavior into consideration. Over the course of this project I have improved my empirical approach by developing feedbackcontrolled brood dummies, by using test arenas with several independent brood dummies, and by implementing individual tracking methods. I will build on my findings to develop a new perspective on questions relevant for our general understanding of division of labor, collective behavior and self-organization. I further pursue these deeply interesting questions in the ‘Collective Behavior’ Cluster at the University of Konstanz.
Publications
- (2015) Collective homeostasis and time resolved models of self-organised task allocation. In BICT 2015 – 9th EAI Int. Conf. on Bio-inspired Information and Communications Technologies, New York City, NY, December 2015
Meyer B, Weidenmüller A, Chen R, Garcia J
(See online at https://doi.org/10.4108/eai.3-12-2015.2262459) - (2018) Behavioral flexibility promotes collective consistency in a social insect. Scientific Reports
Garrison LK, Kleineidam C, Weidenmüller A
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-33917-7)
