Sentences with phrase «social insects»

"Social insects" refers to certain types of insects that live and work together in large groups. They cooperate, help each other, communicate, and have different roles within their communities, just like humans do in a society. Examples of social insects include ants, bees, and termites. Full definition
I also want to understand how variability in these parameters can affect the group success in social insects, in particular in honey bees.
With social insects like ants and bees, it's particularly funny, because most people have never seen a male.
But I have respected colleagues working on social insects who think I got it wrong.
Researchers already knew that many social insects change roles in their colony as they age.
Researchers say that these group «personality types» are linked to food - collecting strategies, and they could alter our understanding of how social insects behave.
Despite the common perception that bees are social insects living in large colonies, most bee species are solitary.
The cultivation of fungi in the nest for food or defense seems to be a widespread practice among social insects.
Social insects invest a lot of work and resources in their colonies, working together to raise large numbers of larvae.
Social insects tend to have larger mushroom bodies than solitary ones, leading researchers to believe that the transition from solitary to social living increased the size of these brain regions.
In social insects, such behavior is more likely to occur in individuals whose potential for other tasks is diminished.
These results could help explain how social insects like ants and bees govern their complex colonies, the researchers say.
The rarity of individuals cooperating in making a structure draws our attention to these ants and only one or two other social insects.
The results suggest that queen pheromones used by divergent groups of social insects evolved from conserved signals of a common solitary ancestor.
Since then social insects such as honey bees and social mammals such as ourselves have pursued separate paths to our well - developed complex sociality.
«This work helps us understand how termites and other social insect colonies function and offers a window into their evolution.
«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.
Animal behaviorist George Gamboa of Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, says the results are «surprising because most of us who work with social insects assume that the communication in a colony is largely chemical.»
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.
To further investigate their findings across a larger sample of social insect species, the researchers then conducted a systematic review of fertility - and queen - linked odors in 64 species using data from previously published studies.
Although many social insects use chemical cues to decide whether someone belongs in their nest, many scientists doubted that insects had the brainpower to recognize individuals.
Researchers have long known that in social insect societies, queens wield tremendous power, laying eggs to the exclusion of the other females in the colony.
They stress that inclusive fitness ideas have helped yield insights into many biological phenomena, such as why social insects have skewed sex ratios.
Substances produced by rival male social insects destroy sperm, and females produce compounds to counteract sperm loss.
«Our thinking is that queen pheromones in social insects likely evolved from «fertility cues» used by female individuals of solitary insect species.
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
A bantam creature, tipping the scales at under 1.5 grams, Leptotyphlops dulcis and its kin eat mainly social insects and their larvae.
«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.
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.
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.
I am trained as an ant biologist, after all, and these charming social insects typically weigh heavily in my photographs (see 2013, 2012, 2011).
Farris points out that parasitism evolved 90 million years before social insects appear, and so «insects had big mushroom bodies for quite a while before sociality arose.»
Instead of comparing social insects with solitary ones, Farris, a neurobiologist at West Virginia University in Morgantown, looked into the past.
Self - detonation as a defensive tool is known to be used by social insects like termites, but it has never been seen accompanied by this type of chemistry.
Vargo said the work represents an important breakthrough, especially when one considers social insects such as honeybees, fire ants and termites are remarkable creatures among which thousands of individuals work together to form a superorganism.
Hamilton's rule explains why altruistic behavior evolved among ants and bees, which are famously social insects.
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.
Margaret Couvillon of the Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects at the University of Sussex puts that in perspective:
This might seem perplexing to some, but Ive just spent two days listening to talks and meeting with people who all work on social insects.
Using ants and other social insects as models, computer scientists have created software agents that cooperate to solve complex problems, such as the rerouting of traffic in a busy telecom network
Estimating effective paternity number in social insects and the effective number of alleles in a population.
OTHER BEHAVIORS of social insects have inspired a variety of research efforts.
Like many social insects, Argentine ants communicate via an assortment of chemicals that they excrete from their gaster (abdomen).
Social insects such as bees, for example, have a single breeding queen.
«Hawaii is interesting because there are no native ants there, so a lot of the local insect and arthropod fauna are not necessarily adapted to dealing with social insects,» Wills said.
In colonies of social insects, workers perform a variety of tasks such as foraging, brood care and nest construction.

Phrases with «social insects»

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