Andreas P. Modlmeier

The keystone individual concept: an ecological and evolutionary overview

The concept of keystone individuals offers a unifying framework to study the evolution and persistence of individuals that have a disproportionately large, irreplaceable effect on group dynamics. Although the literature is teeming with examples of these individuals, disparate terminologies have impeded a major synthesis of this topic across fields. To allow a strict classification of potential keystone individuals, we offer herein some general terminology, outline practical methodological approaches to distinguish between keystone individuals and generic individuals that only occupy a keystone role, and propose ways to measure the effect of keystones on group dynamics. In particular, we suggest that keystone individuals should be classified as ‘fixed’ or ‘episodic’ according to the duration of time over which they impact their group. We then venture into the existing literature to identify distinctive keystone roles that generic and/or keystone individuals can occupy in a group (e.g. dominant individual, leader or superspreader), and describe traits that can give rise to keystone individuals. To highlight the ecological implications, we briefly review some of the effects that keystone individuals can have on their group and how this could affect other levels of organization such as populations and communities. In looking at their diverse evolutionary origins, we discuss key mechanisms that could explain the presence of keystone individuals. These mechanisms include traditional Darwinian selection on keystone-conferring genotypes, experience and state- or context-dependent effects. We close our review by discussing various opportunities for empirical and theoretical advancement and outline concepts that will aid future studies on keystone individuals.

Exploring the effects of individual traits and within-colony variation on task differentiation and collective behavior in a desert social spider

Social animals are extraordinarily diverse and ecologically abundant. In understanding the success of complex animal societies, task differentiation has been identified as a central mechanism underlying the emergence and performance of adaptive collective behaviors. In this study, we explore how individual differences in behavior and body size determine task allocation in the social spider Stegodyphus dumicola. We found that individuals with high body condition indices were less likely to participate in prey capture, and individuals’ tendency to engage in prey capture was not associated with either their behavioral traits or body size. No traits were associated with individuals’ propensity to participation in web repair, but small individuals were more likely to engage in standard web-building. We also discovered consistent, differences among colonies in their collective behavior (i.e., colony-level personality). At the colony level, within-colony variation in behavior (aggressiveness) and body size were positively associated with aggressive foraging behavior. Together, our findings reveal a subtly complex relationship between individual variation and collective behavior in this species. We close by comparing the relationship between individual variation and social organization in nine species of social spider. We conclude that intraspecific variation is a major force behind the social organization of multiple independently derived lineages of social spider.

Species-specific influence of group composition on collective behaviors in ants

The success of a social group is often driven by its collective characteristics and the traits of its individuals. Thus, understanding how collective behavior is influenced by the behavioral composition of group members is an important first step to understand the ecology of collective personalities. Here, we investigated how the efficiency of several group behaviors is influenced by the aggressiveness of its members in two species of Temnothorax ants. In our manipulation of group composition, we created two experimentally reconstituted groups in a split-colony design, i.e., each colony was split into an aggressive and a docile group of equal sizes. We found strong species-specific differences in how collective behaviors were influenced by its group members. In Temnothorax longispinosus, having more aggressive individuals improved colony defense and nest relocation efficiency. In addition, source colony identity strongly influenced group behavior in T. longispinosus, highlighting that manipulations of group compositions must control for the origin of the chosen individuals. In contrast, group composition and source colony did not influence collective behaviors in Temnothorax curvispinosus. This suggests that the mechanisms regulating collective behaviors via individual differences in behavior might differ among even closely related species.