Overview
- The peer-reviewed study by a UCL team was published on 25 May 2026 and reports that experimentally removing queens from Polistes canadensis colonies triggered immediate social breakdown and escalated female aggression.
- Researchers observed a distinct group of non‑competitive individuals, called compensators, who avoided fights and increased foraging and brood care to sustain developing young.
- Compensators did not show clear biological differences from fighting individuals, which suggests their role reflects strategic behavioural choices rather than fixed castes.
- The paper combines fresh experiments with a reanalysis of behavioural field data collected in Panama in the early 2000s to trace how colonies move from chaos back to functional stability.
- The findings challenge models based on temperate species that assume orderly succession is required for stability and imply that violent, competition-driven succession can persist when labour is redistributed; the work was funded by NERC and the Smithsonian.