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Der Superorganismus: Der Erfolg Von Ameisen, Bienen, Wespen Und Termiten (2009)

by Bert Halldobler(Favorite Author)

4.16 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

3540937668 (ISBN13: 9783540937661)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Springer

review 1: Chapter 1 - The Construction of a Super-OrganismEusocial insects are very successful. In one rain forest sample, social insects made up 80 % of the insects. Ants and termites made up 30 % of the animal biomass. Ants alone weighed four times as much as the mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians.Although ants are a million times smaller than humans, they are a million times more plentiful, and so the mass of humans is roughly equal to that of the ants.Generally, social insects control the centre of the land environment, while solitary insects predominate in the margins.Chapter 2 - Genetic Social EvolutionThe target of natural selection is the family, not individuals such as worker casts. Haldane showed that altruism evolves when it increases the success of relatives - "... morekin selection". Hamilton expanded on this and developed the haplodiploid hypothesis - the unfertilized eggs are haploid and become males, while the fertilized eggs are diploid and become females. As a result, the female workers are 3/4 related to each other - more closely than the daughters. This will cause sisters to favour each other and allow societies to arise. Termites, however, have a diploidiploid mode of sex determination. These ideas are elaborated further - group selection, etc.Eusociality has evolved where the behaviour protects a persistant defensible resource from predators. For example, among the parastoid wasps, eusocialty arose in 7 instances where the wasps construct nests and provision them with prey, while it is unknown where the species travels from prey to prey laying eggs. In these conditions, eusociality has evolved in bark beetles, aphids, and snapping shrimps.Detail on the transition to eusociality.Chapter 3 - SociogenesisAlgorithms govern the behaviour of eusocial insects. Natural selection at the colony level creates algorithms that maximize efficient behaviour.Behaviour of eusocial insects is governed by relatively simple decision rules. Examples are given of simple decision rules that generate complex cooperative behaviour.Chapter 4 - The Genetic Evolution of Decision RulesExamples of how gene modification leads to large changes in social behaviour. A change in a gene in American fire ants has lead them to large changes in social behaviour. In the original Brazilian population, there are one or few queens and the nests have well defended boundaries and are therefore well separated. In the U.S. a single genetic change resulted in multiple queen colonies without defended boundaries that spread out with new colonies being formed by fissioning.Chapter 5 - The Division of LaborMore advanced species have larger colony sizes. Increased complexity shows in communication codes, the caste system, and division of labor.The Attine ants are a complex group. They appear to have evolved from ants that cultivated fungi on inset feces and corpses. The shift to growing on fresh vegetation was a huge success, making them among the most abundant of all insects.When some ants and bees are artificially forced together, they readily cooperate. Cooperative behaviour seems to be automatic with the ants, as is division of labor.Adult colony members are separated into reproductive and non-reproductive castes.A temporal division of labor exists where workers move from attending eggs and pupae to attending larvae to working outside the nest. When not working on a specific task, they "patrol" and are available for recruitment. This allows efficient allocation of labor. Detail on the physiology of division of labor is provided.Individuals show good memory skills, remembering the details of surrounding terrain for a number of days. The individual experiences result in different memories and individual contributions to the work of the colony.Task switching is important to the efficient allocation of labor.Worker sub-castes have evolved in only the more complex ant societies. However, the specialization contributes to the efficiency of the colony.Team work and task partitioning are important.Chapter 6 - CommunicationDetails on the honey bee dance. Honey bees estimate the distance travelled by the rate at which they pass objects when in flight.Ants use chemical communication as a primary form of communication. More than 40 glands have been found in the ants. Any species employs at least 10 - 20 signals made up of pheromone mixtures. The pheromones are a large array of chemicals that vary from species to species, almost at random.A great deal of detail on communication is presented.Chapter 7 - The Rise of the AntsThe ants arose during the Cretaceous, about 100 mya.The Ponerine paradox is that although widespread and diverse, they are primitive ants. The colonies are small, the queens lay few eggs, and the workers forage alone.Different families dominate each ecosystem - tropical forest litter, the trees, dry lands (Australia).Chapter 8 - Ponerine AntsSome Ponerines have distinct worker and queen castes; other species have little or no sexual dimorphism. A number of species are examined in detail.Chapter 9 - Attine AntsThe Attines are the most advanced of the ants.The Attines are examined in detail.Chapter 10 - Nest ArchitectureTschinkel and others have obtained casts of ant nests recently, which have resulted in improved knowledge of their construction.It has been shown that colony level patterns result from simple rules in response to local clues. This is the idea of stigmergy - individual workers affect each other through by-products of their activity. Positive feedback exists in that the more rapidly growing structures act as the strongest stimuli. For example, in the weaver ants when any workers have individual success pulling leaves together, other workers join in.In the bees, it has been shown that the scouts pace off prospective nests to determine their size and suitability.In the ants, recruitment to a new nest is done through tandem running where a scout recruits another scout and takes it to the prospective site. Each new scout examines the nest, seeming as thoroughly as the original scout. If suitable, a cascade of scouts develops, moving to the new site.
review 2: This reads as a mid-level textbook. I wasn't thrilled with the writing - I continually had to flip back and forth trying to find definitions which seemed to change from one page to the next - but the material is fascinating. There is a major focus in the early chapters about the evolutionary aspects and genetic underpinnings of insect social behaviors which was not particularly easy to follow, but worth the effort. The book does well in going beyond the mere osbservance of altruistic insect behaviors and explaining in detail the place these insect socities can and should hold in the study of biology generally and how that may benefit human scientific understanding in a broader way. less

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