Energetic basis of colonial living in social insects

Chen Hou; Michael Kaspari; Hannah B. Vander Zanden; James F. Gillooly

doi:10.1073/pnas.0908071107

Edited* by Bert Hölldobler, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, and approved December 23, 2009 (received for review July 26, 2009)

Abstract

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., metabolic rate, reproductive allocation) and life history (i.e., survival, growth, and reproduction) of whole colonies. The similarity in the size dependence of these features in unitary organisms and whole colonies points to commonalities in functional organization. Thus, it raises an important question of how such evolutionary convergence could arise through the process of natural selection.

Footnotes

¹To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: gillooly{at}ufl.edu.
Author contributions: C.H., M.K., and J.F.G. designed research; C.H., M.K., H.B.V.Z., and J.F.G. performed research; C.H., M.K., H.B.V.Z., and J.F.G. analyzed data; and C.H., M.K., and J.F.G. wrote the paper.
↵*This Direct Submission article had a prearranged editor.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0908071107/DCSupplemental.