ReviewBehavioral ecology and sociobiology
From division of labor to the collective behavior of social insects.
Review in Behavioral ecology and sociobiology. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed.
- Colony demographics shape nest construction ineLife · 2026Article
- Article
- Article
- The social organization of the Asian weaver ant colonies: A natural enemy novel sub-castes worker's functional activity findings.PloS one · 2025Article
- Behavioral Variation in Individual and Group Exploration of the Tropical Fire antZoological studies · 2025Article
- The life history of harvester ant colonies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Age dominates flight distance and duration, while body size shapes flight speed inProceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Dynamics of dimorphic workers of Constrictotermes cyphergaster (Blattodea: Termitidae) during nest repair.Journal of insect science (Online) · 2024Article
- Task-specific odorant receptor expression in worker antennae indicates that sensory filters regulate division of labor in ants.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Identifying a developmental transition in honey bees using gene expression data.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Harvester ant colonies differ in collective behavioural plasticity to regulate water loss.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Article
- The economic superorganism in the complexity of evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Explaining workers' inactivity in social colonies from first principles.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Building Resilient Healthcare Teams: Insights from Analogy to the Social Biology of Ants, Honey Bees and Other Social Insects.Perspectives on medical education · 2023Article
- Ecological interchangeability: supporting team adaptive expertise in moments of disruption.Advances in health sciences education : theory and practice · 2022Article
- Age-based spatial distribution of workers is resilient to worker loss in a subterranean termite.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Measuring collective behavior: an ecological approach.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2021Article
- Morphological determinants of bite force capacity in insects: a biomechanical analysis of polymorphic leaf-cutter ants.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2021Article
- Can morphological and behavioral traits predict the foraging and feeding dynamics of social arachnids?Current zoology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
'Division of labor' is a misleading way to describe the organization of tasks in social insect colonies, because there is little evidence for persistent individual specialization in task. Instead, task allocation in social insects occurs through distributed processes whose advantages, such as resilience, differ from those of division of labor, which are mostly based on learning. The use of the phrase 'division of labor' persists for historical reasons, and tends to focus attention on differences among individuals in internal attributes. This focus distracts from the main questions of interest in current research, which require an understanding of how individuals interact with each other and their environments. These questions include how colony behavior is regulated, how the regulation of colony behavior develops over the lifetime of a colony, what are the sources of variation among colonies in the regulation of behavior, and how the collective regulation of colony behavior evolves.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.