superorganism: one construct, many systems

In the study of social insects, a superorganism is a colony (of ants, honey bees, wasps or termites) so integrated that it behaves as a single organism, with the queen as reproductive line, workers as the somatic body, and coordinated functions like nutrition, defence and thermoregulation emerging at the colony level. Wheeler's 1911 The ant-colony as an organism argued this case explicitly, and Hölldobler and Wilson's The superorganism is the modern synthesis of colony-level organisation and its evolution. The referent is a cohesive society treated as a higher-level individual, characterised by colony-level traits and the suppression of within-colony conflict, the same idea that was applied to plant communities and later formalised in evolutionary theory.[1][2]

Unit

A colony integrated enough to act as a single higher-level individual

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied through colony-level traits, division of labour, reproductive skew, and the degree to which within-colony conflict is suppressed

In early plant ecology the same organismal picture was applied to whole vegetation: Clements held that a plant community develops, matures and reproduces like a complex organism, passing through predictable successional stages toward a climax that behaves as an integrated whole. Clements's 1936 Nature and structure of the climax is the mature statement of this community-as-organism view. The referent is a biotic community conceived as a single super-individual, and although it is the same borrowed construct as the insect superorganism, we flag that later ecologists (notably Gleason and Tansley) largely rejected this version in favour of individualistic and ecosystem concepts, so here it is a historically important but contested application rather than settled theory.[3]

Unit

A vegetation community conceived as a single developing organism

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Framed through successional stages, the climax community, and whole-community development, a framing later disputed

Evolutionary biology turned the superorganism into a precise question: under what conditions does a collection of lower-level units become a single evolutionary individual? Queller and Strassmann's 2009 Beyond society: The evolution of organismality proposes that organismality rises with high cooperation among the parts and low conflict between them, placing insect colonies, multicellular bodies and symbioses on one continuum. The referent is the degree to which any group qualifies as an organism, scored by cooperation and conflict, and it is the same recurring construct as Wheeler's colony and Clements's community, now given a general, measurable footing.[4]

Unit

The degree to which a group of parts functions as one evolutionary individual

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Judged by the balance of cooperation among parts against conflict between them, across colonies, bodies and symbioses