Understanding Stress Response in Superorganisms: A Multi-Level and Cybernetic Approach

This review aims to analyze the current knowledge and propose new approaches to understand how environmental stressors impact insect superorganisms across different levels of biological organization. In all multicellular organisms, stress-response mechanisms are hierarchically organized, with processes at lower levels (e.g., cellular) nested within higher levels (e.g., tissues, organs, etc.). Understanding how these responses scale across organizational levels is essential for predicting stressor effects at the organism or superorganism level. Superorganisms, such as honeybee and ant colonies, represent good models to study these dynamics, because they present an additional level of biological organization (e.g., colony level) compared to other pluricellular organisms. This added level of "organismality" allows researchers to observe, at a macroscopic scale (individuals within a colony), mechanisms analogous to those operating at the microscopic scale (cells within an organism). Cybernetic principles-focused on feedback, regulation, and networked interactions-provide a powerful framework for analyzing how the networked structure of the superorganism responds to stress. The final goal is to identify common features across different levels of biological organization that may explain stress response in complex systems.