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Researchers learned from some unusual sweat bee species on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, how the sophisticated division of labor in highly complex insect societies can arise from humble beginnings.

The first time Dumas Gálvez saw the ant species Ectatomma ruidum under a microscope, he was just a little boy. He was immediately fascinated. A few decades later, as a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), a professor in the entomology department at the University of Panama and a mentor to young scientists, he does research on that same ant species. Listen to him narrate every step of his academic journey: his experiences, mentors, mistakes and lessons learned.

Just as contemporary human societies depend on large-scale agriculture, leaf-cutter ants depend on a long, co-evolved relationship with a fungus. As humans, we may share some of the same rules that govern their relationship.

“Her unification of developmental plasticity and genetics is a huge advance in our understanding of evolution. Her decades-long work with tropical social wasps focusing on careful field observation is testimony to what a careful observer of natural history can contribute to evolutionary biology.”-the Linnean Society