仅仅因为你了解自己的工作并不能证明你能够胜任这项工作，这一说法在蚂蚁中同样行得通。
据美国《科学》杂志在线新闻报道，当研究人员根据不同的分工——觅食工、筑巢工以及采石工，用不同的色彩标记了1000多只蚂蚁后，他们发现，与其他类别的工蚁相比，专业蚂蚁并不能更快或更好地完成自己的工作。恰恰相反，有时它们的活儿可能更糟。导致这种低效分工的原因至今尚未搞清。但似乎与培育一名合格的全能工蚁相比，出现这种低效率的工蚁只会消耗种群较少的能量。研究人员在11月19日出版的《PLoS生物学》上报告了这一发现。（生物谷Bioon.com）
生物谷推荐原始出处：
PLoS Biology，DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060285，Anna Dornhaus
Specialization Does Not Predict Individual Efficiency in an Ant
Anna Dornhaus1,2*
1 Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, United States of America, 2 School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom
The ecological success of social insects is often attributed to an increase in efficiency achieved through division of labor between workers in a colony. Much research has therefore focused on the mechanism by which a division of labor is implemented, i.e., on how tasks are allocated to workers. However, the important assumption that specialists are indeed more efficient at their work than generalist individuals—the “Jack-of-all-trades is master of none” hypothesis—has rarely been tested. Here, I quantify worker efficiency, measured as work completed per time, in four different tasks in the ant Temnothorax albipennis: honey and protein foraging, collection of nest-building material, and brood transports in a colony emigration. I show that individual efficiency is not predicted by how specialized workers were on the respective task. Worker efficiency is also not consistently predicted by that worker's overall activity or delay to begin the task. Even when only the worker's rank relative to nestmates in the same colony was used, specialization did not predict efficiency in three out of the four tasks, and more specialized workers actually performed worse than others in the fourth task (collection of sand grains). I also show that the above relationships, as well as median individual efficiency, do not change with colony size. My results demonstrate that in an ant species without morphologically differentiated worker castes, workers may nevertheless differ in their ability to perform different tasks. Surprisingly, this variation is not utilized by the colony—worker allocation to tasks is unrelated to their ability to perform them. What, then, are the adaptive benefits of behavioral specialization, and why do workers choose tasks without regard for whether they can perform them well? We are still far from an understanding of the adaptive benefits of division of labor in social insects.
