Eusociality

Eusociality (Greekεὖeu 'good' or 'true' and social) is the highest level of organization of sociality. It is defined by the following characteristics: cooperative brood care (including care of offspring from other individuals), overlapping generations within a colony of adults, and a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups. The division of labor creates specialized behavioral groups within an animal society, sometimes called castes. Eusociality is distinguished from all other social systems because individuals of at least one caste usually lose the ability to perform behaviors characteristic of individuals in another caste. (Narrow definitions, such as that of Crespi & Yagena, require that an irreversibly sterile caste be present, but this is not universally agreed on.) Eusocial colonies can be viewed as superorganisms.

Eusociality has evolved among the insects, crustaceans, trematodes and mammals. It is most widespread in the Hymenoptera (ants, bees, and wasps) and in termites. A colony has caste differences: queens and reproductivemales take the roles of the sole reproducers, while soldiers and workers work together to create and maintain a living situation favorable for the brood. Queens produce multiple queen pheromones to create and maintain the eusocial state in their colonies; they may also eat eggs laid by other females or exert dominance by fighting. There are two eusocial rodents: the naked mole-rat and the Damaraland mole-rat. Some shrimps, such as Synalpheus regalis, are eusocial. E. O. Wilson and others have claimed that humans have evolved a weak form of eusociality. It has been suggested that the colonial and epiphyticstaghorn fern, too, may make use of a primitively eusocial division of labor.