Cooperative Foraging and Communication in CaterpillarsSilk and chemical markers may catalyze social evolution

higher social insects, gregarious caterpillars have not advanced significantly from a primitive stage of communal grouping. Beginning with Wheeler (1923), biologists have considered the elements of true sociality (eusociality)-cooperative brood care, overlapping generations of parents and offspring, and division of labor-to be characteristic features of ants, termites, and some bees and wasps. Colonies of caterpillars clearly lack the first two of these criteria, and, while a less sophisticated, nonreproductive division of labor was reported to occur in some species of the tent caterpillars Malacosoma (Franz and Laux 1964, Wellington 1957), these findings have been challenged by recent work (Edgerly and Fitzgerald 1982, Papaj and Rausher 1983). In an early attempt to establish a paradigm for the evolution of coloniality in caterpillars, Balfour-Browne (1925) argued that gregarious cater-

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