Biological market theory is potentially useful for understanding helping behaviour in animal societies. It predicts that competition for trading partners will affect the value of commodities exchanged. It has gained empirical support in cooperative breeders, where subordinates help dominant breeders in exchange for group membership, but so far without considering one crucial aspect: outside options. We find support for the existence of a biological market in paper wasps, Polistes dominula. We first show that females...

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The reproductive division of labour between queen and worker castes in social insects is a defining characteristic of eusociality and a classic example of phenotypic plasticity. Whether social insect larvae develop into queens or workers has long been thought to be determined by environmental cues, i.e. larvae are developmentally totipotent. Contrary to this paradigm, several recent studies have revealed that caste is determined by genotype in some ant species, but whether this is restricted to...