Early-season helping yields increasing returns to scale at the onset of eusociality.

ABSTRACT: The evolution of eusociality, characterized by cooperative brood care, reproductive division of labor, and overlapping generations, represents a major evolutionary transition. A central paradox is that early models suggested diminishing returns to helping, making solitary reproduction seemingly more efficient. Here, we experimentally demonstrate increasing returns to scale from early-season helping in the primitively eusocial wasp Polistes gallicus. By manipulating the proportion of females allowed to remain as helpers, we show that while reproductive output scales linearly with worker numbers, total sexual productivity increases convexly with helper probability, thereby showing that early-season helping leads to compounding effects on reproductive output. Using these data, we param

SUBMITTER: Di Pietro V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12676465 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature