Meeting Abstract
Individuals in cooperative groups do not always act in the group’s best interests. The extent to which individuals invest in achieving group versus individual gains varies across animal societies. Polistes paper wasps are an excellent model organism for the study of social cooperation because of the range of variation in foundress association size, reproductive skew and group cohesiveness observed within a single species. In this study we seek to generate testable predictions about the strength of Polistes foundress associations given variable group sizes and relatedness of co-nesting individuals. Using a nested tug-of-war game-theoretic model, we ask how individual investment in group gains varies in a population of nests with heterogeneous group sizes. Our model results will be tested by observing foundress associations of controlled populations of Polistes exclamans nesting in enclosures. Measurements of association sizes, genetic relatedness, reproductive skew, and individual investment in nest provisioning will be compared to the model predictions.
