I am writing a book on division of labor in animal social groups, that also explores the broader question of how animal societies organize around work. Cooperative sociality is built around “social work”, the activities individuals perform that benefit the group. These contributions fit within a general set of behavioral categories, such as social foraging and food sharing, group defense, offspring care, nest maintenance, and thermoregulation. Most animal societies engage in the cooperative performance of some subset of these behaviors. Division of labor is one of the most fundamental strategies for organizing this social work It can be defined as a system in which different individuals perform different roles or tasks within a group. It ranges from the flexible and ephemeral specialization that occurs within almost all social groups, to the permanent physical castes seen in some of the highly social insects, primarily ants and termites. Because of a historical focus on physical castes, division of labor in social insect colonies has been treated as separate from social cooperation in vertebrate social groups. However, they all involve division of labor and the organization of work. By framing division of labor around social cooperation, I hope to bring consilience to these often separately studied fields.
