Jennifer Fewell

• Arizona State University

The social division of labour (DoL) has been renowned as a key driver of the economic success of human societies dating back to ancient philosophers such as Plato (in The Republic, ca 380 BCE), Xenophon (in Cyropaedia, ca 370 BCE) and Aristotle (in Politics, ca 350 BCE, and Nicomachean Ethics, ca 340 BCE). Over time, this concept evolved into a cor...

Division of labour within social groups and the interspecific relationships within mutualisms have traditionally been treated as separate research areas. In this opinion, we align terminologies and concepts between the two fields, by comparing within-group division of labour to the outsourcing of functions in mutualisms. Division of labour and inte...

In animals, metabolic rates during ontogeny often scale differently from the way they do in cross-species or population comparisons, with near-isometric scaling patterns more often observed during juvenile growth. In multiple social insect taxa, colony metabolic rate scales hypometrically across species or populations at the same developmental stag...

Cooperative behavior by nonrelatives is an evolutionary puzzle, because costs of cooperation are often strong while selective factors favoring cooperative groups remain unclear. In some populations of the seed harvester ant Pogonomyrmex californicus, unrelated queens form groups at colony founding (pleometrosis), whereas in other populations, colon...

Wolbachia is a widespread maternally-transmitted endosymbiotic bacteria with diverse phenotypic effects on its insect hosts, ranging from parasitic to mutualistic. Wolbachia commonly infects social insects, where it faces unique challenges associated with its hosts’ caste-based reproductive division of labor and colony living. Here we dissect the b...

Models of social interaction dynamics have been powerful tools for understanding the efficiency of information spread and the robustness of task allocation in social insect colonies. How workers spatially distribute within the colony, or spatial heterogeneity degree (SHD), plays a vital role in contact dynamics, influencing information spread and t...

Ant colonies demonstrate a finely tuned alarm response to potential threats, offering a uniquely manageable empirical setting for exploring adaptive information diffusion within groups. To effectively address potential dangers, a social group must swiftly communicate the threat throughout the collective while conserving energy in the event that the...

Living systems, from cells to superorganismic insect colonies, have an organizational boundary between inside and outside and allocate resources to defend it. Whereas the micro-scale dynamics of cell walls can be difficult to study, the adaptive allocation of workers to defense in social-insect colonies is more conspicuous. This is particularly the...

The honeybee plays an extremely important role in ecosystem stability and diversity and in the production of bee pollinated crops. Honey bees and other pollinators are under threat from the combined effects of nutritional stress, parasitism, pesticides, and climate change that impact the timing, duration, and variability of seasonal events. To unde...

Cooperation between kin and cooperation between non-kin often appear functionally similar, but the evolutionary mechanisms that drive the emergence of these two forms of cooperation can be dramatically different. The mechanisms responsible for non-kin cooperation, in particular, are not well established in an empirical context. To truly understand...

The honeybee plays an extremely important role in ecosystem stability and diversity and in the production of bee pollinated crops. Honey bees and other pollinators are under threat from the combined effects of nutritional stress, parasitism, pesticides, and climate change that impact the timing, duration, and variability of seasonal events. To unde...

As small-bodied terrestrial organisms, insects face severe desiccation risks in arid environments, and these risks are increasing under climate change. Here, we investigate the physiological, chemical, and behavioral mechanisms by which harvester ants, one of the most abundant arid-adapted insect groups, cope with desiccating environmental conditio...

Wolbachia is a widespread endosymbiotic bacteria with diverse phenotypic effects on its insect hosts. Wolbachia also commonly infects social insects, where it faces unique challenges associated with its host's caste-based reproductive division of labor and colony living. Here we dissect the benefits and costs of Wolbachia infection on life-history...

In social insect colonies, individuals are physically independent but functionally integrated by interaction networks which provide a foundation for communication and drive the emergence of collective behaviors, including nest architecture, division of labor, and potentially also the social regulation of metabolic rates. To investigate the relation...

Honey bee pollination services are of tremendous agricultural and economic importance. Despite this, honey bees and other pollinators face ongoing perils, including population declines due to a variety of environmental stressors. Fungicides may be particularly insidious stressors for pollinators due to their environmental ubiquity and widespread ap...

Environmental challenges are major drivers of the evolution of group living. In particular, harsh seasonal conditions can promote temporary or facultative social behaviour in primarily solitary animals. We asked how winter conditions might favour group living in a desert population of a facultatively social carpenter bee, Xylocopa sonorina Smith, t...

Investigations of thermally adaptive behavioral phenotypes are critical for both understanding climate as a selective force and for predicting global species distributions under climate change conditions. Cooperative nest founding is a common strategy in harsh environments for many species, and can enhance growth and competitive advantage, but whet...

Cooperation in nature is usually between relatives, but unrelated individuals can also cooperate, requiring significant benefits to outweigh the costs of helping non-kin. Unrelated queens of the ant, Pogonomyrmex californicus, work together to found a new colony, a phenomenon known as pleometrosis. While previous studies have shown that pleometrosi...

Despite the prominence of kin selection as a framework for understanding the evolution of sociality, many animal groups are comprised of unrelated individuals. These non-kin systems provide valuable models that can illuminate drivers of social evolution beyond indirect fitness benefits. Within the Hymenoptera, whose highly related eusocial groups h...

Alarm signal propagation through ant colonies provides an empirically tractable context for analysing information flow through a natural system, with useful insights for network dynamics in other social animals. Here, we develop a methodological approach to track alarm spread within a group of harvester ants, Pogonomyrmex californicus. We initially...

Kin selection theory has dominated our understanding of the evolution of group living. However, many animal groups form among non-relatives, which gain no indirect fitness benefits from cooperating with nestmates. In this study, we characterized the relatedness and inter-nest migration behavior of the facultatively social carpenter bee, Xylocopa so...

Recent observations of many sublethal effects of pesticides on pollinators have raised questions about whether standard short-term laboratory tests of pesticide effects on survival are sufficient for pollinator protection. The fungicide Pristine® and its active ingredients (25.2% boscalid, 12.8% pyraclostrobin) have been reported to have low acute...

Individual heterogeneity within societies provides opportunities to test hypotheses about adaptive neural investment in the context of group cooperation. Here we explore neural investment in defense specialist soldiers of the eusocial stingless bee (Tetragonisca angustula) which are age sub-specialized on distinct defense tasks and have an overall...

Individual heterogeneity within societies provides opportunities to test hypotheses about adaptive neural investment in the context of group cooperation. Here we explore neural investment in defense specialist soldiers of the eusocial stingless bee (Tetragonisca angustula) which are age sub-specialized on distinct defense tasks, and have an overall...

Although fungicides were previously considered to be safe for important agricultural pollinators such as honey bees, recent evidence has shown that they can cause a number of behavioral and physiological sublethal effects. Here, we focus on the fungicide Pristine® (active ingredients: 25.2% boscalid, 12.8% pyraclostrobin), which is sprayed during t...

Social groups form when the costs of breeding independently exceed fitness costs imposed by group living. The costs of independent breeding can often be energetic, especially for animals performing expensive behaviours, such as nest construction. To test the hypothesis that nesting costs can drive sociality by disincentivizing independent nest foun...

Pollinators and other insects are experiencing an ongoing worldwide decline. While various environmental stressors have been implicated, including pesticide exposure, the causes of these declines are complex and highly debated. Fungicides may constitute a particularly prevalent threat to pollinator health due to their application on many crops duri...

The fitness consequences of cooperation can vary across an organism’s lifespan. For non-kin groups, especially, social advantages must balance intrinsic costs of cooperating with non-relatives. In this study, we asked how challenging life history stages can promote stable, long-term alliances among unrelated ant queens. We reared single- and multi-...

Commercial beekeepers in many locations are experiencing increased annual colony losses of honey bees (Apis mellifera), but the causes, including the role of agrochemicals in colony losses, remain unclear. In this study, we investigated the effects of chronic consumption of pollen containing a widely-used fungicide (Pristine®), known to inhibit bee...

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) and other pollinator populations are declining worldwide, and the reasons remain controversial. Based on laboratory testing, fungicides have traditionally been considered bee-safe. However, there have been no experimental tests of the effects of fungicides on colony health under field conditions, and limited correlationa...

Collective defense is one of the most ubiquitous behaviors performed by social groups. Because of its importance, complex societies may engage a set of defensive specialists, with physical and/or neurological attributes tuned for defense against specific invaders. These strategies must be balanced, however, with the need to flexibly respond to diff...

Facultatively social animals adaptively match social strategy to environmental context; as such, they offer unique insights into the ecological factors facilitating social evolution. We investigated temporal (seasonal) and spatial (nest architectural) factors governing flexible social behavior in the carpenter bee Xylocopa varipuncta Patton using r...

The relationship between division of labor and individuals' spatial behavior in social insect colonies provides a useful context to study how social interactions influence the spreading of elements (which could be information, virus or food) across distributed agent systems. In social insect colonies, spatial heterogeneity associated with variation...

The advantages of group living are partially offset by the cognitive challenges associated with maintaining social boundaries. These challenges can give rise to recognition mechanisms that adaptively integrate information across multiple sensory modalities. The valley carpenter bee, Xylocopa varipuncta, nests in dead wood in large aggregations of u...

The relationship between division of labor and individuals' spatial behavior in social insect colonies provides a useful context to study how social interactions influence the spreading of agent (which could be information or virus) across distributed agent systems. In social insect colonies, spatial heterogeneity associated with variations of indi...

Task allocation is a central challenge of collective behavior in a variety of group-living species, and this is particularly the case for the allocation of social insect workers for group defense. In social insects, both benefits and considerable costs are associated with the production of specialized soldiers. We asked whether colonies mitigate co...

Sudden biotic pressures, such as those from novel diseases and pathogens, require populations to respond rapidly or face potential extinction. How this response process takes place remains poorly understood, particularly in natural environments. In this study we take advantage of unique decade-long data sets of two wild honey bee ( Apis mellifera )...

The fitness consequences of joining a group are highly dependent on ecological context, especially for non-kin. To assess the relationships between cooperation and environment, we examined variation in colony reproductive success for a harvester ant species that nests either solitarily or with multiple, unrelated queens, a social strategy known as...

Darwin famously described special difficulties in explaining social evolution in insects. More than a century later, the evolution of sociality - defined broadly as cooperative group living - remains one of the most intriguing problems in biology. Providing a unique perspective on the study of social evolution, this volume synthesizes the features...

Metabolic rates of individual animals and social insect colonies generally scale hypometrically, with mass-specific metabolic rates decreasing with increasing size. Although this allometry has wide ranging effects on social behaviour, ecology and evolution, its causes remain controversial. Because it is difficult to experimentally manipulate body s...

The evolution of cooperation is a fundamental problem in biology, especially for non-relatives, where indirect fitness benefits cannot counter within-group inequalities. Multilevel selection models show how cooperation can evolve if it generates a group-level advantage, even when cooperators are disadvantaged within their group. This allows the pos...

The California seed harvester ant Pogonomyrmex californicus exhibits striking differences in queen behavior and colony organization throughout its range. Most populations show the likely ancestral condition of single-queen colonies (monogyny). However, in one known population, cooperation between queens during colony founding (pleometrosis) occurs,...

Group size has profound effects on the organization of work. In the social insects, larger colony size is consistently associated with lower mass-specific energy use; similar hypometric relationships between group size and per-gram energy use may extend across other social taxa. The specific mechanisms driving social metabolic scaling vary among sp...

A key requirement for social cooperation is the mitigation and/or social regulation of aggression towards other group members. Populations of the harvester ant Pogonomyrmex californicus show the alternate social phenotypes of queens founding nests alone (haplometrosis) or in groups of unrelated yet cooperative individuals (pleometrosis). Pleometrot...

The metabolic costs of being an organism generally scale hypometrically, such that per‐gram metabolic rates decrease with increasing size. The drivers of this almost universal feature have yet to be clearly identified. Cohesive social groups, particularly the social insects, also show hypometric scaling with colony size. It is not known whether siz...

Queens of the harvester ant Pogonomrymex californicus have been documented as having two distinct behavioral phenotypes controlling both aggression and the tendency to form foundress associations. Pleometrotic queens found colonies cooperatively with nest‐mates while haplometrotic queens found solitary nests. Haplometrotic queens are larger and mor...

The social insects serve as exemplars for social biomimicry, the search for social design inspiration from the natural world. Although their group members are individually much simpler than humans, social insect colonies provide elegant tutorials on the large-scale outcomes that can be achieved by social interactions and self-organizational process...

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