Interrogando uma sociedade de insetos

Interrogating an insect society

Raghavendra Gadagkar,1

+Author Affiliations

Centre for Ecological Sciences and Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India; and Evolutionary and Organismal Biology Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Jakkur, Bangalore 560064, India

Contributed by Raghavendra Gadagkar, April 21, 2009 (sent for review March 26, 2009)

Abstract

Insect societies such as those of ants, bees, and wasps consist of 1 or a small number of fertile queens and a large number of sterile or nearly sterile workers. While the queens engage in laying eggs, workers perform all other tasks such as nest building, acquisition and processing of food, and brood care. How do such societies function in a coordinated and efficient manner? What are the rules that individuals follow? How are these rules made and enforced? These questions are of obvious interest to us as fellow social animals but how do we interrogate an insect society and seek answers to these questions? In this article I will describe my research that was designed to seek answers from an insect society to a series of questions of obvious interest to us. I have chosen the Indian paper wasp Ropalidia marginata for this purpose, a species that is abundantly distributed in peninsular India and serves as an excellent model system. An important feature of this species is that queens and workers are morphologically identical and physiologically nearly so. How then does an individual become a queen? How does the queen suppress worker reproduction? How does the queen regulate the nonreproductive activities of the workers? What is the function of aggression shown by different individuals? How and when is the queen's heir decided? I will show how such questions can indeed be investigated and will emphasize the need for a whole range of different techniques of observation and experimentation.

division of labor Ropalidia marginata social evolution social organization social wasp

Footnotes

1E-mail: ragh@ces.iisc.ernet.in

Author contributions: R.G. designed research, participated in performing research reviewed here, and wrote the paper.

The author declares no conflict of interest.

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