We introduce a new kind of percolation on finite graphs called jigsaw percolation. This model attempts to capture networks of people who innovate by merging ideas and who solve problems by piecing together solutions. Each person in a social network has a unique piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Acquainted people with compatible puzzle pieces merge their puzzle pieces. More generally, groups of people w...

For those of you familiar with previous updates, you might recall the title was “New Disease of Queen Palms (Syagrus romanzoffiana) in the South Florida Landscape.” The change in the title reflects additional information obtained since the last update prepared in May 2006. This document is a summary of information regarding this new disease. If you only want to know the “bottom line,” please fa...

Unlike the queens of other primitively eusocial species, Ropalidia marginata queens are strikingly docile and non-aggressive individuals, never at the top of the behavioural dominance hierarchy of their colonies. Nevertheless, these queens are completely successful at suppressing worker reproduction, suggesting that they do not use aggression but employ some other mechanism (e.g. pheromones) to...

In some ants, bees, and wasps, workers kill or ‘‘police’’ male eggs laid by other workers in order to maintain the reproductive primacy of the queen. Kin selection theory predicts that multiple mating by the queen is one factor that can selectively favor worker policing. This is because when the queen is mated to multiple males, workers are more closely related to the queen’s sons than to the s...

Wingless males of the ant genus Cardiocondyla engage in fatal fighting for access to female sexual nestmates. Older, heavily sclerotized males are usually capable of eliminating all younger rivals, whose cuticle is still soft. In Cardiocondyla sp. A, this type of local mate competition (LMC) has turned the standard pattern of brood production of social insects upside down, in that mother queens...

Stephen M. Fleming, Louise Whiteley, Oliver J. Hulme, Maneesh Sahani, Raymond J. 3 Dolan 4 5 Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, 12 Queen Square, 6 London WC1N 3BG 7 Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, 17 Queen Square, 8 London WC1N 3AR 9 Laboratory of Neurobiology, UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, Bath Street, EC1V 9EL 10 Corresponde...

The effects of sublethal pesticide exposure on queen emergence and virus titers were examined. Queen rearing colonies were fed pollen with chlorpyrifos (CPF) alone (pollen-1) and with CPF and the fungicide Pristine(®) (pollen-2). Fewer queens emerged when larvae from open foraging (i.e., outside) colonies were reared in colonies fed pollen-1 or 2 compared with when those larvae were reared in o...

The Crematogaster subgenus Colobocrema was established to include the single species C. cylindriceps Wheeler, based on a single queen from the Philippines. We discovered a species close to or the same as C. cylindriceps in Borneo and provide descriptions of the queen, worker and male. This species lives in live climber plants of secondary and primary rainforests. The phragmotic morphology chara...

are secreted by queen brood at half the rate found for worker brood. Methyl oleate, repellent to the mite, is secreted in large amounts compared with the attractive esters. Quantitative and qualitative differences in the esters present on worker, drone, and queen broods could partially explain the weaker attraction exerted by queen brood on the mite, compared with the attractive effects of work...