Cognitive Neuroscience: Targeting Neuroplasticity with Neural Decoding and Biofeedback

competition over who shall reproduce, but because it is apparently more efficient for the colony to cycle between phases of reproduction and foraging. Why cycling should be more efficient than continuous reproduction, as is seen in most eusocial insects, has not yet been addressed. Perhaps it is the only way these ants can control egg production. Interestingly, females of some solitary insects show similar cycling, and some aspects of the behaviour of eusocial species may be derived from these cycles [9]. The Teseo paper [2] is important because it brings into sharp focus the relative importance of colony conflict and colony efficiency in the evolution of worker policing. In all other study systems, conflict and efficiency are confounded. A honey bee colony is less efficient if the workers lay eggs [10,11], but did policing first evolve to reduce genetic conflict or increase colony-level efficiency? Teseo et al. [2] have demonstrated that efficiency alone seems to maintain policing in C. biroi, but it still seems that in most other cases it is kin conflict that has driven the evolution of worker policing. Predictions about policing behaviour from conflict theory are strongly supported empirically [1,12]. So, it seems that both conflict and efficiency can be important to the evolution of policing. It is interesting to speculate on whether the policing behaviour observed in C. biroi originally evolved to resolve genetic conflict, and was then co-opted to its present function, or if it arose when the species became clonal, abandoned queens and adopted its current practise of reproductive cycling. In any case, it is now timely to re-emphasise that the concept of worker policing encompasses behaviour that improves colony efficiency as well as resolving conflict [13].