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Societies of social insects are paragons of communication. Multiple channels exist between different members and the transmitted information ranges from specifying the location of foraging areas to who controls reproduction. Whole colonies can also communicate with other colonies or even vertebrates. But what if the individuals within a society are not, in a word, themselves? This chapter explores how adaptive manipulation of host behaviour by parasites, i.e., the extended phenotype of parasites obscures social communication, and it asks how it influences other members of the society. Since manipulated kin are at best cheaters and at worst potential infective agents can the society recognise them? Knowing how a highly complicated example of social communication is broken or subverted by parasites can provide considerable insight into the evolution of communication. The chapter discusses conflict and communication in this system in the context of the debate over the nature of the organism.

This chapter approaches the question of immune specificity from an evolutionary ecology perspective. For the sake of clarity, immune specificity is addressed on two levels. First, immune specificity is considered in the light of evidence for specific interactions between hosts and parasites. The importance of these specific interactions for questions concerning genetic diversity is then discussed. The second level on which immune specificity is addressed in the context of immune priming. It must be stressed that these two phenomena are almost certainly not mutually exclusive. For instance, the level of primed defences may be constrained by the innate defence capacity of an individual. Consequently, immune priming may play a role in the formation of specific interactions between hosts and parasites when re-infections are persistent or infections are chronic. Prior to concluding, the chapter considers sociality, and in particular immune defence within social insects.

Pheromones are chemical substances mediating intraspecific communication in a variety of behavioural contexts. Honeybees constitute a historic model for the study of pheromonal communication in insects so that much is known about the chemical structure of various pheromones, the context in which they are released, and the physiological effects they can exert on receiver bees of different castes. This chapter discusses the neurobiology of pheromone processing in the honeybee brain, from peripheral antennal detection, to central-level processing. It looks at modern electro- and opto-physiological recording techniques at different stages of the honeybee olfactory circuit and asks whether or not the traditional distinction between labeled-line and across-fiber pattern processing applies to pheromone processing as compared to non-pheromonal odors. Finally, new research avenues for stimulating future work in this area are proposed.

This introductory chapter begins with a description of the Order Hymenoptera. It then discusses the rationale behind the book's focus on the wasp family Vespidae. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

When do we care for others as we care for ourselves? William Hamilton showed that we should be expected to care for our family members in proportion to our degree of relationship to them. Such reasoning explains why eusociality evolved independently at least twelve times in the order Hymenoptera, which includes ants, bees, and wasps, but only three times elsewhere in the animal kingdom. It also verifies Thomas Hobbes' answer to the question: Why cannot mankind live sociably one with another as bees or ants?

Collective intelligence allows groups of individuals to solve problems which otherwise could not be solved by a single individual. Insect workers have tiny brains, but by functioning as part of a self-organized colony, they find sophisticated solutions to vital organizational problems (e.g., finding a suitable new home or exploiting the best food sources in a changing environment). In consensus decision making, unanimity among workers is crucial. In contrast, combined decision making requires that different groups of workers within the colony choose different options. Communication and learning are often fundamental in collective decision making. However, as workers gain experience, communication may lose importance as an information source for workers. How social insects collectively solve problems parallels decision making in other biological systems (e.g., neuronal networks), and investigation into social insect collective decision making has inspired new solutions to optimization problems in areas such as computer sciences and the organization of communication networks.

This chapter examines the different types of social forms found in insect taxa, from the relatively simple social behaviors of aggregating species, to the complex cooperative and altruistic interactions that frame cohesive communal and eusocial groups. The diverse patterns of insect social living are considered within an inclusive fitness framework, to explore the fundamental question of why social species can be so successful, but sociality itself is taxonomically rare. To answer this question requires consideration of the ecological, life history and behavioral drivers of social living, including the roles of cooperative group defence, alloparental care, cooperative foraging, and group homeostasis. The evolution of cooperative sociality does not form a single path from group living to eusociality. Instead, its diverse forms represent different evolutionary solutions to those ecological problems that can best be solved by living socially.

This chapter focuses on discourse addressing social insects and their architectural creations. This discourse gainined popularity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These early discussions perceived natural forces as being organized inherently according to certain singularities, often expressed in terms of mathematics. Insects and other natural phenomena were viewed as mathematicians or mathematically determined and this produced interesting ideas that can be related to contemporary discussions of the evolution, technologies, and culture of technical media. The chapter also presents a materialist analysis of animal behavior that challenges the traditional form of hylomorphism, with insects being shown as capable of nonmeasured swarming—a form of temporality and individuation.

Social behavior naturalized in ants conveys complex messages about the naturalness of social behavior in humans, with ramifying implications. If ants divide their labor, communicate, cultivate crops, gather their harvests, raise cattle, wage war on one another, prey on one another, parasitize one another, even support arrays of unrelated, sometimes detrimental species, then how far can similar behaviors be unique products of human nature rather than natural nature in humans who have likewise evolved? How natural, in short, a category is society? And is human freedom within societies a product of nature, or a human attempt to deny it? The biologists Auguste Forel, Erich Wasmann, and William Morton Wheeler each grappled with these problems, finding different tensions and resolutions. The three premier “pure” myrmecologists of their day (as opposed to applied entomologists whose interest in ants lay primarily in devising ways of stamping them out rather than celebrating their marvels), they laid down a foundation of observations, terminology, and theory on the social insects that continue to shape modern biology.

Self-organisation is a common terminology for describing biological phenomena. The developing brain and social insect colonies are used as examples. Small world networks are then described since these often underpin self-organisation. Patterns of behaviour and activity are generated without an overall plan or planner in self-organising systems. It is instead the interactions that generate order from the bottom upwards. Self-organising capabilities maintain the social insect colony, they enable its growth and adaptation towards external influences. Trees are perfect examples of self-organisation. There is no dictating overall plan or planner to control their growth and morphology. Robust behaviour may derive from modular development, obvious in trees and reflected in large numbers of colony workers in social insects. Flexibility results from being able to marshall groups of modules towards necessary objectives. Negative-feedback and feed-forward controls operate to maintain both colonies and trees. Self-organising systems are networks in which fairly simple rules between the components that make up the system, can give rise to quite complex behaviour. A comparative assessment draws attention to analogous forms of behaviour in social insect colonies and large perennials like trees. Amongst these are quorum sensing that underpins the making of decisions. Social insect behaviour is described as swarm intelligence. Since trees act like colonies although joined together, plant intelligence is a suitable term to describe their behaviour too.

Ultimately the goal of the book is to reconstruct the role of insects over the course of human evolution. The aforementioned behavioral accounts will be combined with fossil evidence to reconstruct past diets and determine the role fulfilled by edible insects. This first paleoanthropology chapter focuses on australopithecines, our early ancestors on the hominin lineage. For these reconstructions, the data presented in the chapter on primates are especially enlightening. Chimpanzees as well as other apes tend to specialize in social insects such as termites and ants, making it likely that our earliest ancestors benefited from this behavior as well.

This chapter argues that distributed agency is an inherent consequence of social life and it is proportional to the degree of social organization. Many animals live in groups that may be structured at different levels, ranging from simple aggregations to small family groups, up to cooperative breeding societies, such as those of meerkats with clearly defined helper roles. However, some invertebrates, the social insects, have reached the apex of social organization: eusociality, characterized by reproductive division of labor, cooperative care of young, and overlapping generations. With this social structure, social insects (all ants and termites, some species of bees and wasps) have become tremendously successful in colonizing almost all terrestrial habitats. In tropical forests, social insects represent around 30% of the total animal biomass and 80% of the insect biomass.