Data from: Ant social network structure is highly conserved

The ecological dominance of social insects makes studying their colony
organization fundamentally important to scientists studying collective
systems. The recent combination of automated behavioral tracking and
social network analysis has deepened our understanding of many aspects of
colony social organization. We know how social organization is influenced
by group size, genetic heterogeneity, pathogens and symbionts. However,
because studies have typically investigated the influence of a given
variable on the social network structure of a particular species, we know
little about interspecific variation in network structure. Here we conduct
a comparative network analysis across five ant species from five
sub-families, separated by >100 MY. We find that social network
structure is highly conserved. All species form modular networks, with two
social communities, a similar distribution of individuals between the
communities, and a similar mapping of task performance onto the
communities. The deeply conserved two-community structure highlights that
the most fundamental behavioral division of labor in social insects is
between workers that stay in the nest to rear brood, and those that leave
the nest to forage. This division has parallels across the animal kingdom
in systems of biparental care and likely represents the most readily
evolvable form of division of labor.