Burd found there is a strong size effect on the internal processing, which can take more than 60 minutes to complete. To show this the team supplied four laboratory colonies with known sizes of leaf fragments. They then measured the time it took from the introduction of the leaf discs to the colony until the dissection of the last disc on any of the colony's gardens. They found the optimal leaf fragment size for peak productivity in the laboratory colonies was about 96 millimeters square.This was similar to the size of leaf fragments harvested in the field by the ants. "The inefficiency of the outside work contributed to the efficiency of the whole process," Burd said. The research adds to the 30-year-old Spandrel debate in biology about how to analyze adaptations. These recent findings support the view of the late Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin, who argued that individual adaptations may not be understood outside the context of the whole organism. "But their insistence that suboptimality of component parts does not contribute to optimality of the whole seems incorrect," Burd said. "We have shown that Atta colonies can operate at or near an ergonomic optimum ... that is not necessarily apparent when the component tasks are examined in isolation." Related Links: |
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