Meeting Abstract
Interaction networks provide the connectivity necessary for the emergence of nonlinear patterns in physical, biological, and social complex systems. One of the most widely observed but least understood of these patterns is the allometric scaling of metabolic rate with organismal body size. Even colonies of eusocial insects exhibit metabolic allometry at the collective level of organization. Many of the hypotheses proposed to explain the mechanistic foundation metabolic allometry rely on resource transport and biophysical constraints associated with the scaling of these networks within individual organisms. In a social insect colony, interaction networks provide the foundation for communication and the emergence of complex collective behaviors including nest architecture, division of labor, and potentially also the social regulation of metabolic rates. To investigate the relationship between interactions, metabolic activity, and colony size, a size-manipulation experiment was conducted in which metabolism was determined by flow-through respirometry simultaneously with observing whole colony interaction networks. A spatially explicit random motion interaction simulation was used to provide a null model against which the results of our empirically determined social insect colony interaction networks could be compared. We found that contrary to the predictions of the model, per-capita interaction rate does not scale with colony size or density and that interactions did not correlate as expected with spatial proximity, suggesting that individuals within colonies actively regulate aspects of their spatial organization and social behavior in a scale-free manner.
