D. BALASUBRAMANIAN
The Hindu
TEAM SPIRIT: While a colony of bees has a queen, workers and drones, there is no monarchy. Photo: S. Rameshkurup
Socio-biology throws surprises at us, asking us to be appreciative of
many other animals and even insects like the honeybee and the
cockroach.
We have just gone through a series of successful elections in several
states of India. This has once again shown to the world, and
particularly to our own ruling politicians, that we take democracy
seriously, and believe in consensus-based decisions. And all of us are
delighted that the people of several countries in the Arab world (and
Myanmar too) have the opportunity to vote and practice democracy.
Is democracy a human invention, thought out by homo sapiens and
practiced by us? What do other social animals do? Are there social
practices in animal societies that have an evolutionary origin, handed
down to us? The field of socio-biology throws not only surprises at us
but also teaches us some lessons, asking us to be humble and
appreciative of many other animals and even insects like the honeybee we
admire and the cockroach we detest.
Professor Raghavendra Gadagkar of the Indian Institute of Science at
Bangalore is a well known “eusociologist” who specializes in insect
group behaviour of wasps and bees. He recently described to us how a
colony of wasps or bees organizes itself and optimises resources. He
points out that while the colony has a queen, workers and drones, this
is no monarchy. The queen does not proclaim what the colony should do.
(We call her the queen, rather anthropomorphically, since all she does
is sit around and lay eggs, and is pampered by a retinue of
‘assistants').
She too is just a worker, a special type of worker whose job is just to
keep on laying eggs. There are no palace intrigues, and she too can be,
and is, overthrown or displaced by another ‘egg laying machine'. When
the colony is divided into two, the second queen-less part makes its own
queen.
The “queen” is of course more important than the average worker, but she
is not a dictator whose order the colony must obey. It is a group
activity, with each member playing its role by common agreement.
Yes, the cockroach, the pest whom we want to smash to death the moment
we see it in the kitchen, too forms a congenial society with consensual
rules. Dr. Jose Halloy and his group at the Department of Social Ecology
at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium has been studying
cockroach colonies for over a decade.
He has come to the conclusion that cockroaches practice a simple form of
democracy. In its society, each insect has equal standing and decisions
made by group override those of individuals, and such group decisions
govern what the entire group would do.
How does one devise an experiment to arrive at such an important
conclusion? Halloy's experiment was simple and decisive. He placed the
group of cockroaches in a large dish that had three shelters.
The cockroaches did much “consultation” among themselves by touching and
probing each other through their antennae, and after such consultation,
divided themselves into groups and ran towards the shelters, away from
the light (recall they like dark and no light).
The surprise was in the result. Each shelter could hold 50 insects. Yet
when 50 cockroaches were used in the experiment, they divided themselves
into two groups — 25 went off to shelter 1 and 25 to shelter 2, leaving
shelter 3 vacant. When the researchers brought far larger shelters,
each housing far more than 50, the cockroaches formed a single group and
all went into a single shelter.
Halloy explained the results to mean that a balance is struck between
cooperation and competition for resources. Group formation optimizes
this balance. As he says: “It allows them to increase their reproductive
opportunities, promotes sharing of resources like shelter or food, and
prevents desiccation by aggregating in dry environments, etc”.
Mammals also
Turning to mammals, we do find democracy, or group decisions that govern
the action of the entire colony. Professor Larissa Conradt of the
University of Sussex, UK, who has been studying colonies of red deer,
finds that individuals benefit if they synchronize their activities and
movements, and they have to decide such things collectively.
It is in the interests of the group members to stay together, so that
they reproduce more, optimize resources, detect and avoid predators
better — no different from cockroaches?
More recently, Dr. Frans de Waal of the Yerkes Primate Center at Emory
University, Georgia, U.S., finds increasing evidence for similar group
decisions and behaviour in chimpanzee societies too. In his forthcoming
book “chimpanzee politics”, he describes how an “alpha male” spends a
lot of time grooming allies, sharing food with them and keeping them on
his side. Such consensus builders form more stable social structures and
make group consensus decisions. Would this be the beginning of group
politics, I wonder!
Conradt and Roper describe, in their paper “Democracy in animals: the evolution of shared group decisions” (Proceedings of the Royal Society; B 2007, 274: 2317),
a game theory model of animal group behaviour. They show that a
consensus decision is when the members of a group choose, collectively
between mutually exclusive actions.
This involves consensus “costs”, but equally shared decisions result in
lowered consensus costs than unshared decisions. Is this not what
democracy is about? As we study insects, fishes and mammals, we see the
evolution of cooperative and consultative behaviour in many such animal
colonies and societies, where the members choose to forego some
privileges and bear some costs in order to promote harmony, survival and
flourishing of the group-democracy in action.
