Department of Systems and Computational Biology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY 10461, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2010 Feb 23;107(8):3634-8. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0908071107. Epub 2010 Feb 2.
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.
理解昆虫社会的生态学和进化需要更多地了解社会性如何影响整个群体的表现。代谢缩放理论主要基于代谢率的体重缩放，成功地预测了个体（或单一）生物的许多生理和生活史方面。在这里，我们使用一组多样化的社会性昆虫物种表明，同样的理论预测了整个群体的生理（即代谢率、生殖分配）和生活史（即生存、生长和繁殖）的基本特征的大小依赖性。在单一生物和整个群体中这些特征的大小依赖性的相似性表明功能组织存在共性。因此，它提出了一个重要的问题，即这种进化趋同如何通过自然选择过程产生。
