Dresden 2020 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 43: Statistical Physics of Biological Systems II (joint session BP/DY)

DY 43.4: Talk

Wednesday, March 18, 2020, 16:00–16:15, ZEU 250

Specialisation and plasticity in a primitive social insect — •Adolfo Alsina¹, Solenn Patalano², Martin Bachman³, Irene Gonzalez-Navarrete⁴, Stephanie Dreier⁵, Shankar Balasubramanian³, Seirian Sumner⁵, Carlos Gregorio-Rodriguez⁶, Wolf Reik², and Steffen Rulands¹ — ¹Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany — ²The Babraham Institute, Cambridge, UK — ³University of Cambridge, Cambridge , UK — ⁴Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), Barcelona , Spain — ⁵Institute of Zoology, London , UK — ⁶Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), Madrid, Spain

Biological systems not only have the remarkable capacity to build and maintain complex spatio-temporal structures in noisy environments, they can also rapidly break up and rebuild such structures. How can such systems can simultaneously achieve both robust specialisation and plasticity is poorly understood. Here we use primitive societies of Polistes wasps as a model system where we experimentally perturb the social structure by removing the queen and follow the relaxation dynamics back to the social steady state over time. We combine a unique experimental strategy correlating measurements across vastly different spatial scales with a theoretical approach. We show that Polistes integrates antagonistic processes on multiple scales to distinguish between extrinsic and intrinsic perturbations and thereby achieve both robust specialisation and rapid plasticity. Such dynamics provide a general principle of how both specialization and plasticity can be achieved in biological systems.