Heikki Helanterä, PhD, University of Oulu, Finland (Associate Professor, tenure track)

"Insect societies as superorganisms: anisogamy as a case study"

Heikki Helanterä, PhD

Insect societies have been compared to organisms for more than a century, under the term “superorganisms”. While this analogy has been well described and broadly accepted, it has rarely been pushed further to develop theories of how insect societies evolve. In my talk I will explore the limits of the superorganism analogy, and discuss the implications of superorganismality on social insects and how we study them. I focus on theoretical and empirical work on the evolution of queen and male sizes in social Hymenoptera as analogous to evolution of gamete sizes in multicellular solitary organisms.