Human societies have long depended on the division of labor to thrive—walk into any town, and you can probably find bakers baking bread, truck drivers driving that bread to market and grocers selling it.

A new fossil study from paleobiologists at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History offers insight on how some colony-forming animals, like ants or bees, may have evolved their own system for divvying up work millions of years ago. The team’s findings suggest that when colonies share resources like food efficiently, it can free up some individuals to evolve never-before-seen traits.

Floating time capsules

The study casts a spotlight on a little-known group of aquatic animals called bryozoans. They tend to be small and sometimes look like globs of mucus floating in the water. They also grow in thin sheets over surfaces like corals and piers. They’re not really individuals: Bryozoans are made up of dozens to thousands of microscopic “zooids” that live together in a single, cohesive colony.

The researchers discovered that during that window, some zooids in bryozoan colonies began to lose the ability to feed themselves. But they didn’t die off. Instead, other members of the colony likely shared resources to keep those evolutionary oddballs alive. In the process, these new zooids were able to evolve a wide range of never-before-seen abilities.

Source:

**Origin of division of labor is decoupled from polymorphism in colonial animals **

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/11/pgae476/7830526