Ants and Bees: Common Stomach Regulation Provide Stability for Societies

István Karsai, Thomas Schmickl and George Kampis
Additional contact information
István Karsai: East Tennessee State University, Department of Biological Sciences
Thomas Schmickl: Karl-Franzens-Universitat, Department of Zoology
George Kampis: Eotvos University Budapest

Chapter Chapter 6 in Resilience and Stability of Ecological and Social Systems, 2020, pp 107-123 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The common stomach regulation system, albeit originally found in wasp societies, could be applied to other insect societies as well. We generalized the concept of the common stomach and applied this new concept to describe task allocation mechanisms for Ectatomma ants and honeybees. In these systems, the in- and outflow of the essential materials are regulated by the workforce, and the workforce itself is regulated by the saturation of the materials in the colony. The stability and resilience of colonies are ensured by these feedback loops at various scales. Our sensitivity tests and a comparison of the model predictions to experimental data shows that this regulation appears to be a key to the universal success of insect societies. We show that this mechanism is very robust in general and works well in different environments. We also tested several evolutionary scenarios concerning plant-pollination vs. honeybee colony overwintering, and found that pollen hoarding would be beneficial for the plant and for the short time success of the colony, but it would decrease the honey storages at the same time, which essential for overwintering. A regulation based on the common stomach gives the highest fitness overall.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-54560-4_6

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030545604

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-54560-4_6

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().