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Social insects provide an excellent platform to investigate flow ofinformation in regulatory systems since their successful social organization isessentially achieved by effective information transfer through complexconnectivity patterns among the colony members. Network representation of suchbehavioural interactions offers a powerful tool for structural as well asdynamical analysis of the underlying regulatory systems. In this paper, wefocus on the dominance interaction networks in the tropical social wasp\textit{Ropalidia marginata} - a species where behavioural observationsindicate that such interactions are principally responsible for the transfer ofinformation between individuals about their colony needs, resulting in aregulation of their own activities. Our research reveals that the dominancenetworks of \textit{R. marginata} are structurally similar to a class ofnaturally evolved information processing networks, a fact confirmed also by thepredominance of a specific substructure - the `feed-forward loop' - a keyfunctional component in many other information transfer networks. The dynamicalanalysis through Boolean modeling confirms that the networks are sufficientlystable under small fluctuations and yet capable of more efficient informationtransfer compared to their randomized counterparts. Our results suggest theinvolvement of a common structural design principle in different biologicalregulatory systems and a possible similarity with respect to the effect ofselection on the organization levels of such systems. The findings are alsoconsistent with the hypothesis that dominance behaviour has been shaped bynatural selection to co-opt the information transfer process in such socialinsect species, in addition to its primal function of mediation of reproductivecompetition in the colony.

Social insect colony as a biological regulatory system: Information flow in dominance networks