Energetic basis of colonial living in social insects.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Hou C
PROVIDER: S-EPMC2840457 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Feb
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Energetic basis of colonial living in social insects.
Hou Chen C Kaspari Michael M Vander Zanden Hannah B HB Gillooly James F JF
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20100202 8
Understanding the ecology and evolution of insect societies requires greater knowledge of how sociality affects the performance of whole colonies. Metabolic scaling theory, based largely on the body mass scaling of metabolic rate, has successfully predicted many aspects of the physiology and life history of individual (or unitary) organisms. Here we show, using a diverse set of social insect species, that this same theory predicts the size dependence of basic features of the physiology (i.e., me ...[more]
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