A place for everything and everything in its place: spatial organization of individuals on nests of the primitively eusocial wasp Ropalidia marginata.

ABSTRACT: Non-random space use is common among animals across taxa and habitats. Social insects often use space non-randomly, outside as well as inside their nests. While such non-random space use outside the nest may improve foraging efficiency, inside the nest, it is often associated with the efficient division of labour. Non-random space use by adults on their nests has been hypothesized to result from dyadic dominance interactions, non-random distribution of tasks, differential activity levels, workers avoiding their queens or prophylactic avoidance of disease spread. These hypotheses are generally derived from species in which the tasks of the workers are themselves non-randomly distributed on the nest. Here, we study the primitively eusocial wasp Ropalidia marginata, in which tasks are

SUBMITTER: Sharma N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6784726 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature