Abstract
‘Division of labor’ is a misleading way to describe the organization of tasks in social insect colonies, because there is little evidence for persistent individual specialization in task. Instead, task allocation in social insects occurs through distributed processes whose advantages, such as resilience, differ from those of division of labor, which are mostly based on learning. The use of the phrase ‘division of labor’ persists for historical reasons, and tends to focus attention on differences among individuals in internal attributes. This focus distracts from the main questions of interest in current research, which require an understanding of how individuals interact with each other and their environments. These questions include how colony behavior is regulated, how the regulation of colony behavior develops over the lifetime of a colony, what are the sources of variation among colonies in the regulation of behavior, and how the collective regulation of colony behavior evolves.
Highlights
Abstract ‘Division of labor’ is a misleading way to describe the organization of tasks in social insect colonies, because there is little evidence for persistent individual specialization in task
It seems to me that the history of the use of ‘division of labor’ to describe the organization of social insect colonies provides another example of the persistence of an explanation that is incompatible with the obvious facts
Leaving to others (e.g., Latour 2005) to consider why this idea has such a powerful grip on contemporary thinking, I will argue here that the field of social insect research would benefit by abandoning the phrase
Summary
Received: 12 August 2015 / Revised: 11 November 2015 / Accepted: 18 November 2015 / Published online: 2 December 2015 # The Author(s) 2015. Division of labor in social insects refers to the notion that individuals are specialized to perform particular tasks, such as foraging or cutting leaves. When the notion of division of labor was introduced to social insect research, the emphasis was on the minority of ant genera in which adult workers differ in size, and body size was hypothesized to be associated with task. It has two other but contradictory meanings: both the persistent physiological differences between queens and workers, and the temporary allocation of workers into different tasks This bifurcation in the meaning of ‘caste’ arose because in early work on ants, a worker’s task was considered to be associated with morphology, focusing on that minority of ant genera in which adult workers are of different sizes, and the sizes were the castes. This has left us talking about ‘behavioral castes’ to refer to the fluid, dynamic processes that determine which task an ant is performing at a particular time
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