Specialisation and plasticity in a primitive social insect

Biological systems rely on an influx of energy from the environment to build and maintain complex spatio-temporal structures in noisy environments. It has recently become evident that they also have the remarkable capacity to break up and rebuild such structures, exemplified by the capability of differentiated cells to reprogram after injury. Here we use primitive societies of Polistes wasps as a model system where we experimentally perturb the nest and follow the re-establishment of the social steady state. We combine a unique experimental strategy correlating measurements across vastly different spatial scales with a theoretical approach to show that Polistes integrates antagonistic processes on different scales to simultaneously achieve plasticity and robust specialisation. We show that stability of the nest relies on epigenetic DNA modifications that suppress transcriptional noise. Such dynamics provide a general principle of how both specialization and plasticity can be achieved in biological systems.