Sentences with phrase «many social insects»

Life on this planet has, in the context of its limitations, managed a threefold success: plant and animal life, and among the animals, arthropods (including social insects) and vertebrates (including humankind.

In colonies of social insects, workers perform a variety of tasks such as foraging, brood care and nest construction.

Despite the common perception that bees are social insects living in large colonies, most bee species are solitary.

Ants, social insects that live in structured communities and work around the clock to keep the colony running, really take one for the team.

In some social insects, the males have just one chance to impregnate their queen — which they also use to spoil their rivals» chances by killing off their sperm.

Like other social insects, honeybees live in colonies consisting mainly of closely related members of the worker caste.

And this ultimately supports the hypothesis that fertility signals, which eventually evolved to become queen pheromones that regulate reproduction, have remained the same since the last common solitary ancestor of all social insects, which lived approximately 145 million years ago,» says Wenseleers.

The cultivation of fungi in the nest for food or defense seems to be a widespread practice among social insects.

After a brilliant first day at the social insect conference held at Royal Holloway, University of London, the second day was also filled with interesting and stimulating talks.

With tiny brains and force of numbers, social insects have achieved most of the things we consider quintessentially human — farming, warfare, air conditioning — and have taken over the world.

It lets you work out what these social insects do, and why.

«I hope that my study kind of makes the debate go away,» says Amro Zayed, an entomologist who studies social insects at York University in Toronto and is co-author of one of the new reports.

These results could help explain how social insects like ants and bees govern their complex colonies, the researchers say.

Yet existing mycopesticides worked poorly against social insects, which could smell the spores and stop workers carrying them from entering the nest.

Related Sites American Museum of Natural History's site on social insects Laurent Keller's home page Keller and Hammond's PLoS paper

Could the destiny of social insects and human cells be controlled by the same mechanisms, ask Seirian Sumner and Solenn Patalano

Evolutionary biologist Heike Feldhaar, who studies ants at the University of Würzburg, Germany, says the new study is interesting because it highlights the growing awareness that factors other than just relatedness are important in the lifestyle of social insects.

This discovery of these oversized versions of soldier ants, whose job is to defend the nest, led researchers to create their own supersoldier ants in the lab with the help of a hormone, and, by doing so, offer an explanation for how ants, and possibly other social insects, take on specific forms with dedicated jobs within their colonies.

«If the vegetation is more clumped... they'll end up on the same food plant, which means they'll contact each other and cause each other to change» into social insects, Simpson says.

For social insects, I'm presenting as much evidence as I can summon for each of the two opposing views: Either collateral kin selection is the key, or group selection favored by very unusual environments caused them to be altruistic.

Interestingly, ingested plant miRNAs have a similar inhibitory effect on fruit fly development, even though fruit fly is not a social insect.

No, because I've kept it to social insects.

But I have respected colleagues working on social insects who think I got it wrong.

But Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard professor of biology who is the father of sociobiology and the world's leading expert on social insects, believes that the virtues which GCMA imbued him with were crucial to forming his character, as a citizen and a scientist.

Social insects invest a lot of work and resources in their colonies, working together to raise large numbers of larvae.

But while there was huge diversity among populations, «it was astoundingly different when we looked within populations,» Schal says: Bugs within one infestation were remarkably similar genetically, and their degree of «relatedness» was unusually high — even higher than for some social insects.

Certain species of beetles evolved to live with and leech off social insects such as ants and termites as long ago as the mid-Cretaceous, two new beetle fossils suggest.

This benefit may explain why this apparently selfless behavior persists in social insects, Shreeves says.

In the pantheon of social insects, sweat bees (Megalopta genalis) have a lowly position.

Sean O'Donnell of the University of Washington, Seattle, who works on brain development in social insects, including sweat bees, says this is the first time that it has been shown that participation in a social group is associated with augmented brain development.

Much like social insects, such as honey bees and wasps and social animals like birds and mammals who use alarm calls, when under predation, they are capable of generating a coordinated attack».

With one female producing all the young, as with ants, the spider's behaviour may be closer to that of colonising social insects than to that of any other known spider.

They stress that inclusive fitness ideas have helped yield insights into many biological phenomena, such as why social insects have skewed sex ratios.

Caravan suggests that diseases may have helped to drive the evolution of soldier castes, at least in some species of social insects.

I am trained as an ant biologist, after all, and these charming social insects typically weigh heavily in my photographs (see 2013, 2012, 2011).

This collective behavior that emerges from a group of social insects has been dubbed «swarm intelligence.»

OTHER BEHAVIORS of social insects have inspired a variety of research efforts.

As a result, social insects have developed a host of sophisticated strategies to protect themselves.

ERIC BONABEAU and GUY THÉRAULAZ study the behaviors of social insects and the application of those behaviors in the design of artificial «swarm intelligence» systems.

The research is elegant in its simplicity, according to entomologist Martha Weiss of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. «It quite clearly shows... individual learning in social insects,» she says.

Humans have intricate memories that allow them to keep track of individuals, but scientists have long thought that social insects like wasps eschew recognition of specific individuals in favor of general social rules that apply to everyone.

Instead of comparing social insects with solitary ones, Farris, a neurobiologist at West Virginia University in Morgantown, looked into the past.

Still he was surprised to hear of it happening in a social insect.

To establish that it happens in nature, too, Vargo and his colleagues collected 30 colonies of the destructive Reticulitermes speratus, a Japanese species related to most common termites in the U.S. Like bees and ants, termites are social insects that have different castes for different jobs (such as workers and royalty).

His research foci include the social insects honey bees, bumble bees and stingless bees, the unique biology of which can be used as models to decipher the genetic fundaments of environmental interaction and evolutionary innovation.

It's the first time that such sophisticated alarm signaling has been found in a social insect.

Like many social insects, Argentine ants communicate via an assortment of chemicals that they excrete from their gaster (abdomen).

PD Dr. Martin Hasselmann has been the director of the research group «Population Genetics of Social Insects» at the University of Cologne as a DFG Heisenberg stipendiary since May 2012.

Behavioural scientists usually assume that observation and imitation are at the heart of social learning, but social insects such as bees can also transmit information through touch, vibration and smell.

Most social insects don't tolerate strangers.