The social mirror for division of labor: what network topology and dynamics can teach us about organization of work in insect societies

Division of labor is an emergent and dynamic process that intimately mingles social dynamics and individual behavior. Individuals engage in work, and social interactions between workers couple an individual’s behavior to that of its nestmates, thereby creating flexible and robust division of labor. Because social networks mirror the dual nature of division of labor by representing the individual in the connected web of the society, they are ideally suited to investigate the mechanistic underpinnings that organize social life and drive division of labor. Network analyses provide a panoply of tools that help shed light on the functional role of network structure, and that, if carefully used and combined with well-designed experiments, can revolutionize our comprehension of the distributed regulation of work in social insects. Here, I summarize the emergent nature of division of labor, lay out caveats of social network analysis and then discuss how a selection of network measures can dissect individual level and colony level connectivity to enhance our understanding of division of labor, and provide a more integrated view of how insect societies function.