Food dissemination

The vast majority of a colony, including the queen and brood, spend most of their time inside the nest, exclusively relying on food provided by a few workers who leave the nest to forage. Therefore, food-sharing between individuals is essential to ensure the colony’s survival.

Ants have a pre-digestive organ called the “crop” (often dubbed the “social stomach”), in which they can store food to later be regurgitated and shared with other ants through mouth-to-mouth feedings, termed “trophallaxis”.Thus, foragers bring liquid food in their crops, convey it to receiving colony-members in the nest, who further pass it on in an elaborate cascade of trophallactic events.

We study this process with a novel technique developed in our lab, which enables to link individual actions to collective outcomes. We visualize the food flow within colonies of individually barcoded ants that feed on fluorescently labeled food, simultaneously obtaining data on food loads of individual ants across time and space, interaction patterns between individuals, and the collective nutritional state of the colony.

From a biological perspective, we are interested in how collective food intake regulation emerges from individual behavior, how food distributes and mixes within the colony and how different food types can reach their appropriate destinations. From a functional perspective, we treat the ant trophallactic network as a natural distributed system, exploring its properties, functions and limitations.

Food dissemination

Further reading