Gillooly James F, Hou Chen, Kaspari Michael
Commun Integr Biol. 2010 Jul;3(4):360-2. doi: 10.4161/cib.3.4.11887.
We recently published a paper titled "Energetic Basis of Colonial Living in Social Insects" showing that basic features of whole colony physiology and life history follow virtually the same size-dependencies as unitary organisms when a colony's mass is the summed mass of individuals. We now suggest that these results are evidence, not only for the superorganism hypothesis, but also for colony level selection. In addition, we further examine the implications of these results for the metabolism and lifetime reproductive success of eusocial insect colonies. We conclude by discussing the mechanisms which may underlie the observed mass-dependence of survival, growth and reproduction in these colonies.
我们最近发表了一篇题为《群居昆虫群体生活的能量基础》的论文,该论文表明,当一个群体的质量是个体质量总和时,整个群体生理学和生活史的基本特征实际上与单体生物遵循相同的规模依赖性。我们现在认为,这些结果不仅是超个体假说的证据,也是群体水平选择的证据。此外,我们进一步研究了这些结果对群居昆虫群体的新陈代谢和终生繁殖成功率的影响。我们通过讨论这些群体中观察到的生存、生长和繁殖的质量依赖性可能背后的机制来得出结论。