Berthold Karl Hölldobler

Insect societies play a dominant role in terrestrial ecology. Their astounding evolutionary success is based on remarkable systems of division of labor involving hundreds and thousands of individual organism. Such cooperative organizations can only work by means of integrating communication systems. Understanding the behavioral mechanisms, the chemistry, physics, neural physiology, and information technology underlying such communication systems is one of his major research goals. Like in any social group, also in insect societies cooperation is often accompanied by social conflict. Sociogenetical investigations, employing DNA-fingerprinting techniques, help understand the evolution of such contradictory behavioral patterns in animal societies.