Researchers have discovered that wasps provide crucial support to their extended families by babysitting at neighboring nests.
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“These wasps can act like rich family members lending a hand to their second cousins. If there’s not much more you can do to help your immediate family, you can turn your attention to the extended family.”
-Dr. Patrick Kennedy, lead author and Marie Curie research fellow in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol
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Findings
By closely observing twenty thousand baby wasps and their carers on colonies around the Panama Canal, the research team was able to determine the usefulness of workers on colonies of different sizes. They showed that workers become less useful as the number of colony members rises, due to a surplus of help.
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“By helping more distant relatives who are more in need — those living next door with fewer carers — workers can pass on more copies of their genes overall. We believe that similar principles of diminishing returns might explain seemingly paradoxical acts of altruism in many other social animals.
“The fact that these paper wasps in Central and South America help at other colonies is really bizarre when you consider that most wasps, ants and bees are extremely hostile to outsiders. To solve this puzzling behavior, we combined mathematical modelling with our detailed field observations.”
-Dr. Patrick Kennedy, lead author and Marie Curie research fellow in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol
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Wasps usually viciously attack outsiders, so this babysitting suggested something unusual was going on.
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“Wasps offer amazing windows into the evolution of selflessness. There is so much going on in a wasp nest: power struggles, self-sacrifice, groups battling against the odds to survive… If we want to understand how societies evolve, we should look more deeply at wasps.”
-Dr. Patrick Kennedy, lead author and Marie Curie research fellow in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol
Journal Reference: Kennedy, P., Sumner, S., Botha, P. et al. Diminishing returns drive altruists to help extended family. Nature, Ecology and Evolution, 2021. DOI: 10.1038/s41559-020-01382-z
