Premier Presentation: Division of labor from 50,000 evolutionary feet

Questions and controversies about the roles of nature versus nurture in division of labor in social Hymenoptera have given way to new challenges in identifying mechanisms that underlie caste determination, and how genetic and environmental factors are integrated to produce complex colony-level adaptations. As we learn more about the remarkable coordination of tasks in the social Hymenoptera and termites, eusocial species beyond these advanced groups offer opportunities to understand the broad patterns of convergence, divergence and constraint in the evolution and regulation of division of labor and caste. I briefly review what we know - and mostly what we do not know - about division of labor across social invertebrates.