Individual crop loads provide local control for collective food intake in ant colonies

Greenwald, Efrat; Baltiansky, Lior; Feinerman, Ofer

doi:10.7554/elife.31730

Cited by 50 publications

(129 citation statements)

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“…The “self‐organization” of a colony seems to be driven by individual ant needs, and the assessment of such needs by nestmates (Greenwald, Baltiansky, & Feinerman, ; Warner, Lipponen, & Linksvayer, ) is possibly also the case here. This study exemplifies that in the case of a super‐organism, which is composed of mostly low‐related individuals, self‐organization is not obtained through kin selection, unlike the usual case of highly related cells/individuals.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Worker demography and behavior in a supercolonial ant colony: The case of the desert antCataglyphis niger

Brodetzki

Feinerman

et al. 2019

Ethology

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Insect societies headed by multiple queens (polygyny) raise evolutionary questions, such as how does genetic heterogeneity among colony members affect in‐nest interactions; or, are all queens equally reproductive or equally treated by workers? Answering such questions requires intensive and continuous observations of in‐nest behavior. Here, we addressed these questions in the polygyne supercolonial ant, Cataglyphis niger, using a barcoding system that enables the tracking of individual interactions, together with polymorphic DNA microsatellite markers that indicate the matriline and patriline of all individuals. Our findings that both queens and workers have low interrelatedness corroborate earlier reports regarding the supercolony structure of C. niger. Ovary inspection and worker genotyping revealed that all the queens contribute similarly to nest demography. Tracking positions of individual workers through time revealed that only a small proportion of them are constantly engaged in tending the queens and can be considered as retinue workers. However, genotyping these workers and the attended queens revealed no relationship to genetic relatedness, again typical of a true polygyne and supercolonial species. Unlike invasive supercolonial species, C. niger is native to Israel, enabling us to address questions regarding the driving forces, other than kin selection, that stabilize this society.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Worker demography and behavior in a supercolonial ant colony: The case of the desert antCataglyphis niger

Brodetzki

Feinerman

et al. 2019

Ethology

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“…As food accumulates in the colony (Fig. 1b-d) it also flows between non-forager ants as they interact among themselves [17, 33].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…During the course of an experiment, the total amount of food held by the colony grows until it reaches saturation (Fig. S1e) 1 [1, 33]. The fraction of the total food held by ant a by P a ( t ) = n a ( t ) /Z ( t ) is not uniform across colony members (Figs.2a, S1) and is restricted by variable physiological properties such as crop capacity.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Colony entropy - Allocation of goods in ant colonies

Greenwald

Eckmann

Feinerman

2019

Preprint

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Allocation of goods is a key feature in defining the connection between the individual and the collective scale in any society. Both the process by which goods are to be distributed, and the resulting allocation to the members of the society may affect the success of the population as a whole. One of the most striking natural examples of a highly successful cooperative society is the ant colony which often acts as a single superorganism. In particular, each individual within the ant colony has a "communal stomach" which is used to store and share food with the other colony members by mouth to mouth feeding. Sharing food between communal stomachs allows the colony as a whole to get its food requirements and, more so, allows each individual within the colony to reach its nutritional intake target. The vast majority of colony members do not forage independently but obtain their food through secondary interactions in which food is exchanged between individuals. The global effect of this exchange is not well understood. To gain better understanding into this process we used fluorescence imaging to measure how the collected food is distributed and homogenized within a Camponotus sanctus ant colony. Using entropic measures to quantify food-blending, we show that while collected food flows into all parts of the colony it homogenizes only partly. We show that mixing is controlled by the ants' interaction rule in which only a fraction of the maximal potential is actually transferred. This rule leads to a robust blending process: i.e., neither the exact food volume that is transferred, nor the interaction schedule are essential to generate the global outcome. Finally, we show how the ants' interaction rules may optimize a trade-off between fast dissemination and efficient mixing. Author summaryWe study how food is distributed in colonies of ants. Food collected by a small fraction of ants is distributed throughout the colony through a series of mouth-to-mouth interactions.An interesting interplay exists between food dissemination and food mixing within the colony. High levels of dissemination are important as they ensure that any food type is available to any ant. On the other hand, high dissemination induces mixing and this reduces the required variety of nutritional choices within the colony.Tracking fluorescent-labelled food and interpreting the results within concepts of information theory, we show that food collected by each forager reaches almost every March 4, 2019 1/30 ant in the colony. Nonetheless, it is not homogenized across workers, resulting in a limited level of mixing. We suggest that the difference in food mixture held by each individuals can provide ants the potential to control their nutritional intake by interacting with different partners.

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“…The colonies of social insects in particular are striking examples of highly integrated, complex biological systems that can self-regulate without centralized control (7). Consequently, social insects have emerged as powerful systems to study collective behavior and social dynamics, both experimentally and theoretically (8–12). However, few experimental studies have comprehensively measured the influence of group composition—e.g., in age, genotype, or morphology—on collective organization, because the inherent complexity of many social insect colonies renders their composition intractable.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emergent behavioral organization in heterogeneous groups of a social insect

Ulrich

Kawakatsu²,

Tokita

et al. 2020

Preprint

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The composition of social groups has profound effects on their function, from collective decision-making to foraging efficiency. But few social systems afford sufficient control over group composition to precisely quantify its effects on individual and collective behavior. Here we combine experimental and theoretical approaches to study the effect of group composition on individual behavior and division of labor (DOL) in a social insect. Experimentally, we use automated behavioral tracking to monitor 120 colonies of the clonal raider ant, Ooceraea biroi, with controlled variation in three key correlates of social insect behavior: genotype, age, and morphology. We find that each of these sources of heterogeneity generates a distinct pattern of behavioral organization, including the amplification or dampening of inherent behavioral differences in colonies with mixed types. Theoretically, we use a well-studied model of DOL to explore potential mechanisms underlying the experimental findings. We find that the simplest implementation of this model, which assumes that heterogeneous individuals differ only in response thresholds, could only partially recapitulate the empirically observed patterns of behavior. However, the full spectrum of observed phenomena was recapitulated by extending the model to incorporate two factors that are biologically meaningful but theoretically rarely considered: variation among workers in task performance efficiency and among larvae in task demand. Our results thus show that different sources of heterogeneity within social groups can generate different, sometimes non-intuitive, behavioral effects, but that relatively simple models can capture these dynamics and thereby begin to elucidate the basic organizational principles of DOL in social insects.Significance StatementWhen individuals interact in an aggregate, many factors that are not known a priori affect group dynamics. A social group will therefore show emergent properties that cannot easily be predicted from how its members behave in isolation. This problem is exacerbated in mixed groups, where different individuals have different behavioral tendencies. Here we describe different facets of collective behavioral organization in mixed groups of the clonal raider ant, and show that a simple theoretical model can capture even non-intuitive aspects of the behavioral data. These results begin to reveal the principles underlying emergent behavioral organization in social insects. Importantly, our insights might apply to complex biological systems more generally and be used to help engineer collective behavior in artificial systems.

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Individual crop loads provide local control for collective food intake in ant colonies

Cited by 50 publications

References 41 publications

Worker demography and behavior in a supercolonial ant colony: The case of the desert antCataglyphis niger

Worker demography and behavior in a supercolonial ant colony: The case of the desert antCataglyphis niger

Colony entropy - Allocation of goods in ant colonies

Emergent behavioral organization in heterogeneous groups of a social insect

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