Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-11-2016
Description
Evolutionary benefits of task fidelity and improving information acquisition via multiple transfers of materials between individuals in a task partitioned system have been shown before, but in this paper we provide a mechanistic explanation of these phenomena. Using a simple mathematical model describing the individual interactions of the wasps, we explain the functioning of the common stomach, an information center, which governs construction behavior and task change. Our central hypothesis is a symmetry between foragers who deposit water and foragers who withdraw water into and out of the common stomach. We combine this with a trade-off between acceptance and resistance to water transfer. We ultimately derive a mathematical function that relates the number of interactions that foragers complete with common stomach wasps during a foraging cycle. We use field data and additional model assumptions to calculate values of our model parameters, and we use these to explain why the fullness of the common stomach stabilizes just below 50 percent, why the average number of successful interactions between foragers and the wasps forming the common stomach is between 5 and 7, and why there is a variation in this number of interactions over time. Our explanation is that our proposed water exchange mechanism places natural bounds on the number of successful interactions possible, water exchange is set to optimize mediation of water through the common stomach, and the chance that foragers abort their task prematurely is very low.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Citation Information
Agrawal, Devanshu; and Karsai, Istvan. 2016. The Mechanisms of Water Exchange: The Regulatory Roles of Multiple Interactions in Social Wasps. PLoS ONE. Vol.11(1). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0145560 PMID: 26751076
Copyright Statement
© 2016 Agrawal, Karsai. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.