Teams in animal societies

We review the existence of teams in animal societies. Teams have previously been dismissed in all but a tiny minority of insect societies. "Team" is a term not generally used in studies of vertebrates. We propose a new rigoro us definition of a team that may be applied to both vertebrate and inverteb rate societies. We reconsider what it means to work as a team or group and suggest that there are many more teams in insect societies than previously thought. A team task requires different subtasks to be performed concurrent ly for successful completion. There is a division of labor within a team. C ontrary to previous reviews of teams in social insects, we do not constrain teams to consist of members of different castes and argue that team member s may be interchangeable. Consequently, we suggest that a team is simply th e set of individuals that performs a team task. We contrast teams with grou ps and suggest that a group task requires the simultaneous performance and cooperation of two or more individuals for successful completion. In a grou p, there is no division of labor-each individual performs the same task. We also contrast vertebrate and invertebrate teams and find that vertebrate t eams tend to be associated with hunting and are based on individual recogni tion. Invertebrate teams occur in societies characterized by a great deal o f redundancy, and we predict that teams in insect societies are more likely to be found in large polymorphic ("complex") societies than in small monom orphic ("simple") societies.