Individual crop loads provide local control for collective food intake in ant colonies
Abstract
Nutritional regulation by ants emerges from a distributed process: food is collected by a small fraction of workers, stored within the crops of individuals, and spreads via local ant-to-ant interactions. The precise individual-level underpinnings of this collective regulation have remained unclear mainly due to difficulties in measuring food within ants' crops. Here we image fluorescent liquid food in individually tagged Camponotus sanctus ants, and track the real-time food flow from foragers to their gradually satiating colonies. We show how the feedback between colony satiation level and food inflow is mediated by individual crop loads; specifically, the crop loads of recipient ants control food flow rates, while those of foragers regulate the frequency of foraging-trips. Interestingly, these effects do not rise from pure physical limitations of crop capacity. Our findings suggest that the emergence of food intake regulation does not require individual foragers to assess the global state of the colony.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Israel Science Foundation (833/15)
- Ofer Feinerman
European Research Council (648032)
- Ofer Feinerman
The Estate of Rachmiel Ramon Bloch
- Ofer Feinerman
The Clore Foundation
- Ofer Feinerman
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Iain D Couzin, Princeton University, United States
Version history
- Received: September 3, 2017
- Accepted: February 19, 2018
- Accepted Manuscript published: March 6, 2018 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: March 21, 2018 (version 2)
- Version of Record updated: March 23, 2018 (version 3)
Copyright
© 2018, Greenwald et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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