Behavioral traits and diet were traditionally thought to be highly plastic within individuals.
This view was espoused in the widespread use of optimality models, which broadly predict …

Highlights•Body size variation is common in solitary and social bees.•In solitary species,
larval growth is controlled by diet and the abiotic environment.•In social bees, larval …

Social selection influences the evolution of weapons, ornaments and behaviour in both
males and females. Thus, social interactions in both sexual and non-sexual contexts can …

Visual learning admits different levels of complexity, from the formation of a simple
associative link between a visual stimulus and its outcome, to more sophisticated …

Polistes are an ideal system to study ultimate and proximate questions of dominance, and to
test theoretical predictions about social evolution. The behaviors typically associated with …

Eusocial insects provide special opportunities to elucidate the evolution of ageing as
queens have apparently evaded costs of reproduction and reversed the fecundity–longevity …

The status signalling hypothesis aims to explain within-species variation in ornamentation
by suggesting that some ornaments signal dominance status. Here, we use multilevel meta …

Dominance hierarchies are group-level properties that emerge from the aggression of
individuals. Although individuals can gain critical benefits from their position in a hierarchy …

Heterogeneity among individuals is a central aspect of evolu-tionary ecology. Evolutionary
changes of a population depend on selection pressures acting on individual's phenotypic …

To successfully navigate their social environments animals need to assess conspecifics.
Quality signals and social recognition are 2 assessment strategies that animals employ to …