Waiting on a mule deer crossing…
Season length and its associated variables can influence the expression of social behaviors, including the occurrence of eusociality in insects. Among bees, ants, and wasps, social behaviors can vary widely across environmental gradients, both within and between different species. While numerous theoretical models have been developed to examine the traits in a species’ life history that underlie the emergence and maintenance of eusociality, the impact of seasonality on this process is largely uncharacterized. Here, we present a theoretical model that builds on these foundational models by incorporating season length and offspring development time. The integration of these environmental and life history traits into a single, individual-focused model enables detailed examination of how these factors can shape the costs and benefits of social living. We find that longer season lengths and faster brood development times are sufficient to favor the emergence and maintenance of a social strategy, while shorter seasons favor a solitary one. We also identify a range of season lengths where social and solitary strategies can coexist. Moreover, our theoretical predictions are well-matched to the natural history and behavior of two, flexibly-eusocial bee species, suggesting our model can make realistic predictions about the evolution of different social strategies. Broadly, this work reveals the crucial role that environmental conditions can have in shaping social behavior and its evolution and underscores the need for further models that explicitly incorporate such variation to study evolutionary trajectories of eusociality. The above data is needed to reproduce Figure 4 in this manuscript, showing the matching between our theoretical predictions and the weather data.
Knowledge graph centered on Data from: Variation in season length and developm with 10 nodes and 30 connections. Top connected: seasonal cycle, social phenotype, social caste system, development, Sarah Kocher.
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