Figure 2

Task switching and functional plasticity (adapted from [6]): Part of the Darwinian success of superorganisms is the ability of the workers to switch tasks quickly and reliably. This can be understood as an issue of labor optimization: A) A non-social organism has no choice when addressing a task but to perform it as an unbroken series of steps. B) A colony can perform many such tasks simultaneously in parallel series. C) The whole process accelerates if the workers switch opportunistically from task to task to perform whatever task is closest in a series-parallel process, which is observed in some social insects. The efficacy of the system increases if groups of workers are specialized in size, anatomical proportions (allometry) and physiological competence (metabolic division of labor) to perform certain roles. This kind of task partitioning evidently decreases cost per unit yield in time and energy.