Agenda

Large societies are more complex than small societies. Two factors are particularly relevant as group size increases: division of labor, where individuals specialize on different tasks, and social recognition, where individuals recognize their group, and the social status of their group members. During my stay at the IVEP, I will use clonal Ponerine ants (Platythyrea punctata) to test how their division of labor changes with group size, and I will test if their dominance hierarchies are built on recognizing “individuals” or “social statuses”. I hypothesize that, if recognizing “individuals” exists, it cannot persist as group size increases. I will also present my previous work on the colony recognition abilities of eusocial trematodes.