The construction of nests in insect societies requires building materials, pulp and water foragers, builders and also an organized workforce for effective construction. The central hypothesis of this study is that wasp societies developed a social crop, or common stomach, which stores water and provides a mechanism for worker connectivity, which in turn regulates construction behaviour. Inspired by the construction behaviour of social wasps, an agent-based model is presented to show that via the usage of the common stomach, larger colonies enjoy the benefit of having highly effective foragers, while most of the swarm stays on the nest and only a few engage in highly risky foraging trips. We also demonstrate how colony efficiency changes as a function of colony size and the constitution of the labour distribution, as well as how indirect interactions can increase efficiency of labour in wasp societies.

Construction of wasp nests is a self organized process that requires building materials, pulp and water foragers, and builders to cooperate. In this paper we study how the society of agents use a social crop, or common stomach, to store water that also provides a mechanism for worker connectivity, which in turn regulates building. Our model predicts that via the common stomach usage, medium sized colonies enjoy the benefit of having highly effective foragers and this in turn means that the colonies need only endanger a few foragers to ensure steady construction. When pulp foraging becomes more costly than water foraging, the colonies adjust via recruiting more pulp foragers and less water foragers, but keep high numbers of common stomach wasps on the nest. The common stomach provides an adaptable platform for indirect worker connectivity and a buffer for water storage.

Submitted by PATRÍCIA DA SILVA NUNES null (paty_snunes@yahoo.com.br) on 2016-08-01T18:45:57Z No. of bitstreams: 1 TESE- Patrícia da Silva Nunes.pdf: 3291691 bytes, checksum: fd718fcfe90cb9a708df028a9adcf54c (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Ana Paula Grisoto (grisotoana@reitoria.unesp.br) on 2016-08-03T14:20:11Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 nunes_ps_dr_bauru.pdf: 3291691 bytes, checksum: fd718fcfe90cb9a708df028a9adcf54c (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-03T14:20:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 nunes_ps_dr_bauru.pdf: 3291691 bytes, checksum: fd718fcfe90cb9a708df028a9adcf54c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-06-03 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Frederic Edward Clements (1874-1945) foi um botânico e ecólogo estadunidense. Realizou trabalhos principalmente na área de Ecologia Dinâmica. Recebeu reconhecimento perante a comunidade científica, sobretudo após a publicação do livro "Plant Succession: an analysis of the development of vegetation", em 1916. Nessa obra defendeu a metáfora das formações vegetais como entidades orgânicas, o superorganismo. Após esse trabalho foi convidado a integrar o corpo de pesquisadores da Instituição Carnegie, em Washington (EUA), conseguindo assim maiores financiamentos para as suas pesquisas. Seus trabalhos, alvos de críticas e elogios, contribuíram para a institucionalização da Ecologia enquanto ciência no século XX. Tendo em vista a importância das ideias desse autor para a estruturação desse campo, objetivou-se neste trabalho investigar as suas contribuições, a partir de fontes originais, com o propósito de oferecer subsídios para a discussão a respeito de seus aportes para o ensino da Ecologia no nível superior de educação. A fim de que compreendêssemos mais profundamente o alcance de sua obra, foram realizadas entrevistas com seis professores universitários, que além de discutirem a obra de Clements, ainda teceram diálogos sobre a inclusão da História e Filosofia da Ciência no ensino. Esse fato é interessante, pois a história da ciência, segundo pesquisadores da área, pode configurar-se como uma ferramenta importante para a aprendizagem científica. Cabe ressaltar que as entrevistas foram analisadas pelo método da análise de conteúdo e as obras, por meio de análises documentais. Após a triangulação dos dados foi verificado que Clements trouxe importantes contribuições para a Ecologia, como a elaboração de novos conceitos, inserção de terminologias, criação de métodos de pesquisa – como o método de parcelas, confecção de instrumentos para trabalhos de campo, discussão sobre critérios de rigor científico para a área e, ainda, trouxe uma visão sistêmica para os ambientes naturais. Para o ensino, especificamente, contribuiu com a elaboração de experimentos e procedimentos para aulas de campo destinadas a alunos universitários. Ainda hoje seus trabalhos estão presentes em livros-texto utilizados nos cursos de graduação de Biologia e Ecologia, confirmando assim o reconhecimento da sua importante contribuição como pesquisador. / Frederic Clements (1874-1945) was an American botanist and ecologist who carried out works mainly in Dynamic Ecology field. He received recognition from the scientific community, especially after the publication of "Plant Succession: an analysis of the development of vegetation", in 1916. In this work, he defended the analogy of plant formations as organic entities, the superorganism. After this work, he was invited to join the body of researchers on the Carnegie Institution, in Washington, DC (USA), thereby achieving greater funding for his research. His works, targets of criticism and praise, contributed to the strengthening of Ecology as a science in the twentieth century. Given the importance of this author's ideas to the structuring of this field, the aim of the present work was to investigate his contributions, based on the original sources, in order to provide subsidies for discussion of his additions to the teaching of Ecology in higher education. To broadly understand the scope of his work, interviews were conducted with six university professors. Besides discussing Clements' production, they dialogued on the inclusion of History and Philosophy of Science in education. This is an interesting fact because, according to researchers in the field, the History of Science can be configured as an important tool for scientific learning. It is worth noting that the interviews were analyzed by content analysis method, and the works by documental analysis. After analysis, it was confirmed that Clements brought many contributions to Ecology, as the development of new concepts, introduction of terminologies, creation of research methods – as the quadrat method, creation of fieldwork instruments, discussion on scientific rigor criteria on this area, and even brought a systemic vision of the natural environment. Specifically on teaching, he contributed through the preparation of experiments and procedures for field classes for college students. Even today, his works are present in textbooks used in Biology and Ecology undergraduate courses, conforming the recognition of his remarkable contribution as a researcher.

Social insects are the most dominant terrestrial fauna for the last 50 million years. This tremendous ecological success is accompanied by the fact that sociality has evolved multiple times independently and achieved highest degree of complexity in insect lineages. The remarkable social organization found in insect societies is the result of finely balanced cooperation and conflict among the colony members. A typical hymenopteran colony is characterised by one or a few queens monopolizing reproduction and several sterile workers co-operatively raising brood and performing colony activities. The colonies are often conceptualized as superorganisms where groups of cooperative workers are compared with organs in the body, each of which accomplish a particular task like brood care, foraging and defence. The choice of tasks is often regulated by a systematic age polyethism. As the queens monopolize reproduction, they serve as the sole suppliers of eggs in the colony. Therefore, loss or death of the queen creates a crucial void which exposes the colony to potential reproductive conflict for the position of egg-layer. This crisis is expected to be extreme in monogynous colonies. The situation is rescued only after a new queen is established, and the whole process is known as queen succession. I am interested in this crisis management, and my thesis deals with potential and realized conflicts associated with queen succession and behavioural strategies involved in resolution of these conflicts. The queen can be replaced in two ways - either by a newly eclosed specialized reproductive individual, which happens in highly eusocial hymenopterans, or by an existing member of the colony (worker), as it happens in primitively eusocial hymenopterans. Unlike in highly eusocial species, the workers of primitively eusocial species retain their ancestral capability of mating and activating ovaries to produce both sons and daughters, which makes them suitable for taking up the role of queen in their lifetime. Hence, primitively eusocial species provide a unique situation where loss or death of the queen might result in severe reproductive conflict as the queen can be replaced by any one of the existing workers. Strictly monogynous colonies of the tropical primitively eusocial wasp Ropalidia marginata provide ideal opportunities to study the reproductive conflict and its resolution associated with queen succession because the queen is frequently replaced by one of her nestmates resulting in a serial polygyny. These queens have highly variable tenures of queenship ranging from seven to over 200 days, which, together with the fact that they are replaced by a variety of relatives such as daughters, niece and cousins, suggests a potential reproductive conflict with variable degrees of complexity. I have divided my thesis in three parts which are as follows -Natural queen turnover: Previous works from this lab have tried to characterize the queen succession in R. marginata colonies by experimentally removing the queen from the colony. As this design involves the experimenter intervening at a random point of the colony cycle, the colony might not respond in the similar way as it might have done to a natural succession necessitated by loss or death of the queen. But rarity and unpredictability of natural queen turnovers made them difficult to study. Therefore, in this section, we gathered a dataset of long-term and opportunistic quantitative behavioural observations on eleven natural queen turnovers and compared them with available data on queen removal experiments. All our queen removal experiments resulted in a hyper-aggressive potential queen who gradually reduced her aggression, activated her ovaries and went on to become the unanimously accepted new queen of the colony if the original queen was not returned. Here we found a similar phenomenon in natural colonies where a single un-challenged potential queen took over the colony as new queen after the old queen was lost, died or was driven out of the colony. In some of the natural colonies, the transition was preceded by aggression shown by the potential queens towards their nestmates including the queens, which indicates that they might have pre-empted the transition. The potential queens in natural colonies started laying eggs much faster than in experimental colonies suggesting their physiological readiness for the transition. How does a colony respond to a declining queen?: As we could show that some of the potential queens might perceive the upcoming queen turnover, a fair prediction would be that they sense it through the declining fertility status of the queens. Therefore, we tried to ex-perimentally induce situations where the queen appears to be declining, expecting that it might lead to a queen turnover. The growing evidence suggests that R. marginata queen maintains her status by applying a pheromone on the nest surface by rubbing the tip of her abdomen. We knocked down the nest to deny the queen the surface for applying her pheromone, and argued that the queen would be overthrown as the workers would sense her as infertile. To our surprise, the queen maintained her status in six out of seven colonies by applying her pheromone on the entire surface of the cage. However, the effectively insufficient concentration of pheromone elicited aggression from workers towards the queen, and the queen retaliated back with aggression. These results suggest that the pheromone, being an honest signal of fertility, is extremely important for the queen for maintaining her reproductive monopoly, and the workers are able to perceive the decline of the queen from her pheromone. Queen-successor conflict over access to reproduction: Here we more explicitly looked at the potential reproductive conflict between the queen and her successor over access to direct reproduction. We used the theory of parent-offspring conflict proposed by Robert Trivers (1974) as the conceptual framework and adapted it to unravel the pat-tern of queen-successor conflict in R. marginata colonies. According to this idea, we expected that there should be a pre-conflict zone where the queen and the successor both would agree that the queen should continue to reproduce, followed by a conflict zone where the successor would try to takeover but the queen would hang on, finally followed by post-conflict zone where they both would agree that the successor should reproduce. To test this expectation, we maintained the queen and the potential queen on either side of a wire-mesh partition, each with randomly chosen half of the workers. It allowed the potential queen (successor) to establish herself and then we reintroduced the queen to her side of the mesh daily till the queen gave up. We could behaviourally characterise all three zones which always appeared in the expected sequence. The pre and post-conflict zones had no aggressive interaction between the queen and the potential queen, whereas the conflict zone was characterized by aggressive falling fight between them. This is our first success in experimentally creating overt conflict between the queen and her successor. Overall we can say, that the queens and the potential queens of R. marginata show great behvioural plasticity which might have been shaped by natural selection as an adaptation for conflict resolution. We could show that the potential queens sometimes can predict the upcoming transition and pre-pare themselves accordingly, whereas they can also react to an experimentally created sudden loss of queen by hugely elevating their aggression. The docile queens, on the other hand, maintain their reproductive monopoly by a pheromone, which is essentially a feature of highly eusocial species. But these docile queens have not lost their capability to show aggression and can use that to complement the insufficient concentration of her pheromone. This and the behaviour of potential queens in their establishment phase are strongly reminiscent of typical primitively eusocial species. We conclude that Ropalidia marginata is, perhaps, a particularly advanced primitively eusocial hymenopteran situated on an evolutionary continuum from primitive to highly eusocial species.

I am part of and dependent on a bigger unit – humanity. I am one of the small parts that build up this organism. Being human is an identity that I cannot choose, sometimes it is heavy to carry this role but it is also a support – and necessary for my survival. – My text describes some of the experiments I have performed, a few pages from my journal and some thoughts on which I base my making. My method has been an ethnographic exploration with myself and some objects I created as tools for researching my own body in relation to public spaces, using similar methods as Gösta Arvastson and Billy Ehn describe in their book Etnografiska Observationer (Arvastson & Ehn 2009).  I noticed unconscious synchronised patterns of movement performed by people inhabiting public spaces. After some experiments I realized that I feel insecure when I break those patterns. It became clear to me that my body is programmed to, and does its best, to fit into certain norms. However, sometimes I am incapable or don´t want to conform.