Using Nutritional Geometry to Explore How Social Insects Navigate Nutritional Landscapes

Abstract

Insects face many cognitive challenges as they navigate nutritional landscapes that comprise their foraging environments with potential food items. The emerging field of nutritional geometry (NG) can help visualize these challenges, as well as the foraging solutions exhibited by insects. Social insect species must also make these decisions while integrating social information (e.g., provisioning kin) and/or offsetting nutrients provisioned to, or received from unrelated mutualists. In this review, we extend the logic of NG to make predictions about how cognitive challenges ramify across these social dimensions. Focusing on ants, we outline NG predictions in terms of fundamental and realized nutritional niches, considering when ants interact with related nestmates and unrelated bacterial, fungal, plant, and insect mutualists. The nutritional landscape framework we propose provides new avenues for hypothesis testing and for integrating cognition research with broader eco-evolutionary principles.

Pollen Protein: Lipid Macronutrient Ratios May Guide Broad Patterns of Bee Species Floral Preferences

“…A challenge of foraging bees is to both balance diets for themselves and for their offspring, needing to be sensitive to the pollen protein and lipid requirements of developing larvae [69]. The above three species presented have different larval feeding strategies.…”

Mechanisms of Nutritional Resource Exploitation by Insects

“…The studies published in this Special Issue highlight the need for more detailed and comparative studies on the sensory ecology of insects to investigate the factors (e.g., dietary specialization, the level of sociality [ 9 ] or the ability to modify resources (see e.g., [ 16 ]), determining nutritional quality assessment, cue perception and decision making across species to fully understand how insects adjust resource selection and exploitation in response to environmental heterogeneity and variability.…”

“…In eusocial insects, such as ants and several bee species, the challenge of coping with variation in resource chemistry is further amplified by often largely different caste- or symbiont-specific nutritional needs among colony members, which all need to be met simultaneously, as discussed by Crumière and colleagues [ 9 ]. Moreover, social organization, which typically implies division of labor, appears to be closely linked to nutritional regulation.…”

“…Contributions in this special issue highlight the need for a better integration of mechanistic studies, with more classical descriptions of nutritional requirements, to fully understand the behavioral, physiological and/or sensory adaptations that enable resource selection and exploitation by insects. Such integration can only be performed by considering mechanisms at multiple levels of organization (e.g., individuals, societies, host-parasites, competitors and predators) and their interactions across levels (as discussed in [ 9 ] and other recent studies [ 25 , 26 , 27 ]). Morimoto and Lihoreau [ 28 ] and Crumière and colleagues [ 9 ] highlight the importance of further developing existing concepts of nutrition research, such as the Geometric Framework of Nutrition (GFN [ 3 ], see description by authors), which has proven to be an extremely useful tool for assessing the impact of nutrient ratios (e.g., P:L) in insects and animals in general.…”

“…Such integration can only be performed by considering mechanisms at multiple levels of organization (e.g., individuals, societies, host-parasites, competitors and predators) and their interactions across levels (as discussed in [ 9 ] and other recent studies [ 25 , 26 , 27 ]). Morimoto and Lihoreau [ 28 ] and Crumière and colleagues [ 9 ] highlight the importance of further developing existing concepts of nutrition research, such as the Geometric Framework of Nutrition (GFN [ 3 ], see description by authors), which has proven to be an extremely useful tool for assessing the impact of nutrient ratios (e.g., P:L) in insects and animals in general. Morimoto and Lihoreau [ 28 ] call for open access GFN data as a basis to start developing comparative analyses, and they provide a template for structuring such data to facilitate meta-analyses using quantitative methods [ 28 ].…”