ArticleNature communications2022
Resource sharing is sufficient for the emergence of division of labour.
Article in Nature communications, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 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
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Review
- Flexibility in task performance and division of labour in a cooperatively breeding cichlid.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2026Article
- Novel behavioural assays reveal sex-specific behavioural syndromes in anemonefish.Journal of fish biology · 2025Article
- The evolution of division of labour: preconditions and evolutionary feedback.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Division of labour during honeybee colony defence: poetic and scientific views.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Division of labour as key driver of social evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Review
- Coevolution of larval signalling and worker response can trigger developmental caste determination in social insects.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Programming Dynamic Division of Labor Using Horizontal Gene Transfer.ACS synthetic biology · 2024Article
- Resource adaptation drives the size-complexity rule in termites.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Early CD4Scientific reports · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Division of labour occurs in a broad range of organisms. Yet, how division of labour can emerge in the absence of pre-existing interindividual differences is poorly understood. Using a simple but realistic model, we show that in a group of initially identical individuals, division of labour emerges spontaneously if returning foragers share part of their resources with other group members. In the absence of resource sharing, individuals follow an activity schedule of alternating between foraging and other tasks. If non-foraging individuals are fed by other individuals, their alternating activity schedule becomes interrupted, leading to task specialisation and the emergence of division of labour. Furthermore, nutritional differences between individuals reinforce division of labour. Such differences can be caused by increased metabolic rates during foraging or by dominance interactions during resource sharing. Our model proposes a plausible mechanism for the self-organised emergence of division of labour in animal groups of initially identical individuals. This mechanism could also play a role for the emergence of division of labour during the major evolutionary transitions to eusociality and multicellularity.
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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.