{"id":567,"date":"2026-05-25T06:49:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T13:49:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/wildscience\/?p=567"},"modified":"2026-05-25T06:49:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T13:49:11","slug":"when-the-queen-dies-the-peacemakers-take-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/wildscience\/2026\/05\/25\/when-the-queen-dies-the-peacemakers-take-over\/","title":{"rendered":"When the Queen Dies, the Peacemakers Take Over"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remove a queen from a tropical paper wasp colony and the nest goes to pieces, more or less immediately. Aggression rates jump tenfold within 24 hours. Workers that had spent their days foraging for food drop what they’re doing and start fighting instead, biting, grappling, stinging. Multiple females compete simultaneously for the reproductive vacancy, and the social networks that previously organised the colony’s daily life collapse into something considerably messier. By any reasonable measure, the colony should fail. Often it doesn’t. And a new study from UCL has worked out why.<\/p>\n

The answer involves a group of individuals the researchers call “compensators,” workers who quietly sidestep the whole succession brawl and redirect their energy into keeping the colony fed.<\/p>\n

The study focuses on Polistes canadensis<\/em>, a Neotropical paper wasp found across the Caribbean and Central America whose colonies are organised around a single reproductive female. All the other females are workers, but they are not sterile, which is biologically significant: any of them could, in principle, become the next queen. When the reproductive dies or disappears, there is no orderly transfer of power. No second-in-command quietly inherits the role. Instead, a contest breaks out, with many individuals simultaneously trying to establish dominance through physical aggression. Fieldwork in Panama, carried out in the early 2000s, gave Owen Corbett and colleagues at UCL enough behavioural data to map what actually happens during that contest in granular, individual-level detail.<\/p>\n

What they found complicates the standard picture of conflict and cooperation in animal societies.<\/p>\n

Before the queen is removed, roughly 23% of colony members engage in any aggressive behaviour at all, and most of that aggression comes from the queen herself, who uses it to suppress worker reproduction. The social hierarchy is steep and mostly unidirectional; workers barely fight among themselves. Then the queen goes, and within a day, 41% of individuals are actively participating in aggressive interactions. The aggression network, previously a simple hub-and-spoke structure centred on the queen, becomes denser and more tangled, with reciprocal fighting between workers who had previously maintained a kind of wary non-aggression. Colony-level aggression rates hit around 30 aggressive acts per hour at PostQR-1 (the researchers’ shorthand for the first 24 hours post queen removal) and climb further to about 44 per hour by day three.<\/p>\n

Keeping the Lights On<\/h2>\n

Here is the part that should not work: foraging rates barely budge. Despite nearly half the colony being absorbed in fighting, the overall rate of food delivery to the nest stays comparable to pre-removal levels. The brood keeps getting fed. Affiliative networks, the food-sharing relationships between individuals, remain largely intact. It looks, from the colony’s perspective, as if nothing much has gone wrong, which is rather strange given that a great deal has.<\/p>\n

The explanation is the compensators. When established foragers reduce their off-nest trips and join the fighting, a different group of individuals steps up to replace them. Most post-removal foragers, about 69% by count, were not previously observed foraging at all. They had been present on the nest, largely inactive, and when the succession contest began they apparently made a different calculation: instead of competing for reproductive dominance, they switched into foraging roles. “While some individuals fought over dominance,” Corbett said, “others completely avoided the conflict and quietly stepped up to keep the colony running. Cooperation didn’t disappear; it was redistributed.”<\/p>\n

What determines which wasps fight and which wasps forage? This is, it turns out, an open question, and one the researchers can’t fully answer from the data available. Body size plays no role; the compensators are not physically smaller or weaker than the fighters. Prior dominance scores, calculated from behavioural observations before queen removal, don’t predict which strategy a wasp will adopt. The identity of the future queen is similarly unpredictable until several days into the contest, when one individual starts pulling ahead in dominance rankings. Before that point, future queens look more or less identical to everyone else who is competing. Chemical signals, perhaps pheromone-based fertility markers of the sort found in some queenless ants, could be doing some of the sorting, but that remains speculative at this stage.<\/p>\n

A Third Way Between Convention and Chaos<\/h2>\n

The research opens a window onto a previously underexamined corner of social insect biology. Most of what we know about queen succession in wasps comes from temperate species in Europe and North America, where colonies typically operate on what biologists call “predetermined succession” systems: a clear dominance hierarchy exists before the queen dies, and whoever is second in line simply steps up. These systems are tidy, relatively low-cost, and well understood. What they are not is universal. P. canadensis<\/em> represents a different arrangement entirely, one where the succession mechanism is an open contest that looks, on its face, deeply inefficient and potentially ruinous. The UCL findings suggest it’s neither, at least not when compensators are doing their job.<\/p>\n

Some species with aggression-based succession, like the African paper wasp Belonogaster juncea<\/em>, suffer catastrophically when the queen is lost: colonies frequently collapse, brood numbers plummet, and the whole enterprise often fails. What P. canadensis<\/em> appears to have is a kind of institutional resilience that B. juncea<\/em> lacks, a buffer in the form of workers who opt out of competition and maintain essential functions instead. Whether that buffer evolved specifically as an adaptation to aggressive succession, or whether it’s a more general property of how these colonies manage labour, is unclear.<\/p>\n

Professor Seirian Sumner, senior author on the study, draws the comparison outward. “In times of turmoil, society depends on those who keep doing the essential work in the background,” she said. “In many ways, we may be more like wasps than we realise.” It’s an analogy that could easily tip into overstatement but probably doesn’t, quite: vertebrate cooperative breeders, meerkats, cichlids, naked mole-rats, all show elevated aggression following the loss of a dominant reproductive, and all face the same basic problem of maintaining group function during a succession crisis. Whether compensation mechanisms exist in those systems, and if so what form they take, is an empirical question that this research makes considerably more pressing.<\/p>\n

For the wasps themselves, what happens next depends on which individual has, through a week-long contest of attrition, accumulated enough dominance to take the reproductive role. She inherits a colony that, largely because of those who stayed out of the fight, remains intact and functional. Something to be said for keeping the lights on while others squabble over who controls the switch.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/j.anbehav.2026.123581<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Frequently Asked Questions<\/h2>\n

What makes Polistes canadensis<\/em> unusual compared to other social wasps?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Most well-studied paper wasp species have orderly, predictable succession systems where a pre-existing dominance hierarchy determines who becomes queen when the current one dies. P. canadensis<\/em> has no such convention. Instead, queen loss triggers a chaotic open contest among multiple females simultaneously, a system that looks costly but turns out to be more resilient than expected because some workers opt out of fighting to maintain colony function.<\/p>\n

How did the researchers know the compensators weren’t just young wasps aging into foraging roles?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The pre-removal and immediate post-removal observations were conducted on the same day, which rules out natural age-related progression as an explanation. Wasps that had shown no foraging behaviour whatsoever made the switch to foraging within hours of queen removal, far faster than normal maturation would account for.<\/p>\n

Could the “compensator” strategy actually be the smarter reproductive bet?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Possibly. Workers who maintain the colony by foraging are keeping alive the brood, which in P. canadensis<\/em> colonies typically consists largely of their own siblings, so they gain indirect fitness benefits even without personally reproducing. Whether compensators also retain some chance of inheriting the reproductive role in future succession events is not yet known, but it’s a question the researchers flag as worth investigating.<\/p>\n

Why were the study’s data collected more than 20 years ago?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The behavioural data come from fieldwork conducted in Panama in the early 2000s by some of the same research team. Reanalysing historical datasets with modern network analysis tools is increasingly common in behavioural ecology, and the richness of the original observations, with individual wasps colour-marked and their every interaction recorded, made this kind of granular follow-up analysis possible.<\/p>\n

Does this research have any implications for understanding human organisations during leadership crises?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The researchers are careful not to overstate the parallel, but the basic pattern, some individuals competing for succession while others maintain essential operations, does map onto dynamics observed in human institutions during leadership transitions. Whether that similarity reflects shared evolutionary pressures or is merely analogous is a philosophical question; the behavioural data themselves are clear enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remove a queen from a tropical paper wasp colony and the nest goes to pieces, more or less immediately. Aggression rates jump tenfold within 24 hours. Workers that had spent their days foraging for food drop what they’re doing and start fighting instead, biting, grappling, stinging. Multiple females compete simultaneously for the reproductive vacancy, and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1298,"featured_media":568,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-behavior"],"yoast_head":"\nWhen the Queen Dies, the Peacemakers Take Over - Wild Science<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/wildscience\/2026\/05\/25\/when-the-queen-dies-the-peacemakers-take-over\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"When the Queen Dies, the Peacemakers Take Over\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Remove a queen from a tropical paper wasp colony and the nest goes to pieces, more or less immediately. 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