Regulation of task differentiation in wasp societies: a bottom-up model of the "common stomach"

Metapolybia wasps live in small societies (around one hundred adults) and rear their young in nests they construct on flat surfaces from plant materials. For processing nest paper, they must gather plant materials and process it into pulp with water. The water is collected by water foragers and is transferred to pulp foragers indirectly via a "common stomach." The common stomach, or social crop, is formed by generalist wasps called laborers. These wasps can engage in water exchange, store water in their crops, and may become specialist foragers or builders. We provide an alternative model for regulating task partitioning in construction behavior by using an agent based modeling framework parameterized by our field observations. Our model predicts that assessing colony needs via individual interactions with the common stomach leads to a robust regulation of task partitioning in construction behavior. By using perturbation experiments in our simulations, we show that this emergent task allocation is able to dynamically adapt to perturbations of the environment and to changes in colony-level demands or population structure. The robustness of our model stems from the fact that the common stomach is both a strong buffer and a source of several feedback mechanisms that affect the individual wasps. We show that both the efficiency and the task fidelity of these colonies are dependent upon colony size. We also demonstrate that the emergence of specialist wasps (individuals with high task fidelity) does not require any special initial conditions or reinforcement at the individual level, but it is rather a consequence of colony-level workflow stability. Our model closely mimics the behavior of Metapolybia wasps, demonstrating that a regulation mechanism based on simple pair-wise interactions through a common stomach is a plausible hypothesis for the organization of collective behavior.