Social Group Formation and Cooperation in Paper Wasps (P. Fuscatus)
Creators: name: Laub, Emily
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Cooperation
subject: Evolution
subject: Paper wasps
subject: Cognition
subject: Personality
subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
subject: Science

description: Social group formation is theorized to play an important role in the evolution and maintenance of cooperation, as assortment of beneficial cooperators is critical for maintaining the benefits of cooperating. While there is growing appreciation for the profound variability in social phenotypes within populations, little work has examined how individual traits might shape the process and outcome of social group formation. Individual differences in social phenotypes are important because selection should act on individuals and traits within social groups, thus impacting how cooperation may evolve. Through a series of experiments conducted in a large naturalistic enclosure, I characterized and examine the social and fitness consequences of two different social phenotypes, personality and social intelligence, in the primitively eusocial paper wasps Polistes fuscatus (P. fuscatus). My second chapter examines social and non-social personality traits in nest-founding queens. I find that social and non-social personality traits form behavioral syndromes which has important implications for how social traits may be selected across contexts. In my second and third chapter, I empirically test how personality (Chapter 3) and social cognition (Chapter 4) impact social group foundation in nest founding queens. By monitoring behavior of wasps throughout their lifespan, I find that individual traits have important implications for the process and outcome of social group formation. Further, individuals vary significantly in how they assess social partners, join groups, and behave within these groups. Excitingly, I find that individuals do not benefit equally within social groups and that individual traits have significant impacts on success within social groups. In Chapter 2, I find that social group formation may be subjected to similar trade-offs present in mate selection. Personality mediates a trade-off between assessment of social partners and formation of stable social bonds, with more exploratory and active individuals sampling more partners but joining groups later. Additionally, I find that this difference in sampling impacts the likelihood of achieving social dominance through “first-arriver effects”, suggesting that personality may impact reproductive opportunities in cooperative breeders through differences in group formation. In Chapter 3, I demonstrate that social cognition has important impacts on how social groups form, cooperate, and reproduce. Excitingly, I find that social cognition is linked with both a fitness benefit and behaviors that promote group reproduction, suggesting that cognition is a socially selected trait. Individuals with better performance on a cognitive test engage in more cooperative behaviors, spend more days in stable groups, and build larger nests. Additionally, this fitness effect is observed when only comparing the cognitive abilities of individuals that should receive the majority or reproduction on nests, demonstrating that cognition may be socially selected at the level of the individual. In total, this work supports the predictions of the social intelligence hypothesis, finding that cognition is linked with both success and behavioral mechanisms to promote success in social groups. This body of work advances the study of evolution through demonstrating that cooperation can evolve through selection on individuals within social groups and suggests that cognition may play a role in the evolution of cooperative behaviors. Furthermore, my work demonstrates that differences in social group formation may impact the reproductive opportunities of individuals within social groups. Collectively, this work advances understanding of how individual traits impact the process and outcome of social group formation.