The role of the ant colony largely consists of non-reproductive tasks, such as foraging, tending brood, and defense. However, workers are vitally linked to reproduction through their provisioning of sexual offspring, which are produced annually to mate and initiate new colonies. Gynes (future queens) have size-associated variation in colony founding strategy (claustrality), with each strategy r...

An ant colony operates without central control. Each ant uses only local information, mostly odor, and no ant can make global assessments about what needs to be done. No ant gives instructions to another. Through the local decisions of individuals, colonies adjust their behavior to current conditions. An ant decides where to go and what to do based on its recent experience of brief interactions...

Social insects exhibit coordinated behaviour without central control. Local interactions among individuals determine their behaviour and regulate the activity of the colony. Harvester ants are recruited for outside work, using networks of brief antennal contacts, in the nest chamber closest to the nest exit: the entrance chamber. Here, we combine empirical observations, image analysis and compu...

T oday science is in the age of biology and biology is in the age of genomics. Sequencing the entire genome of an organism, an enterprise that could not have been imagined barely 50 y ago, is being thought of as the first step toward a complete understanding of its biology. If I had been asked to recommend just two families of living organisms from which to pick the first two species for whole-...

Nutrient storage is an important, but understudied life history trait. One approach to characterizing the role of nutrient storage in insect life histories begins with determining the rules that organisms use to allocate nutrients to storage in comparison to other life history traits. My dissertation research focuses on understanding rules of allocation to nutrient storage in two types of insec...

The reproductive ground plan hypothesis (RGPH) proposes that the physiological pathways regulating reproduction were co-opted to regulate worker division of labor. Support for this hypothesis in honeybees is provided by studies demonstrating that the reproductive potential of workers, assessed by the levels of vitellogenin (Vg), is linked to task performance. Interestingly, contrary to honeybee...