{"paper":{"title":"Emergent Workload Inequality in Collective Excavation","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"physics.bio-ph","authors_text":"Aradhya Rajanala, Daniel. I. Goldman, Laura K. Treers, Michael A. D. Goodisman, Naomi Wagner, Nathan Nguyen","submitted_at":"2026-02-27T19:56:03Z","abstract_excerpt":"Living collectives and artificial swarms frequently employ a division of labor, wherein individuals take on different tasks or perform different amounts of work. However, the mechanisms used by collectives to divide labor remain poorly understood. Here, we study how workload inequality arises in collectives by monitoring excavation in Solenopsis invicta fire ants, whose coordination in constrained environments makes them an attractive system for studying division of labor. We vary group size (between 2 and 25 ants) and track digging activity to create Lorenz curves and corresponding Gini coeff"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2603.00281","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2603.00281/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}