Limitations of response thresholds models of division of labor

High levels of cooperation are often cited as the primary reasons for the ecological success of social insects. In social insects, workers perform a multitude of tasks such as foraging, nest construction and brood rearing without central control of how work is allocated among individuals. It has been suggested that workers choose a task by responding to stimuli gathered from the environment. Response threshold models assume that individuals in a colony vary in the stimulus intensity (response threshold) at which they begin to perform the corresponding task. In a recent paper, we investigated the limitations of the models of division of labor that base on the response thresholds. This abstract is meant to convey a brief summary of the points we raised in that study.