Individual crop loads provide local control for collective food intake in ant colonies
نویسندگان
چکیده
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 spread 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.
منابع مشابه
Interaction Networks and the Regulation of Ant Colony Behavior
An ant colony operates without central control. Each ant uses only local information, mostly odor, and no ant can make global assessments about what needs to be done. No ant gives instructions to another. Through the local decisions of individuals, colonies adjust their behavior to current conditions. An ant decides where to go and what to do based on its recent experience of brief interactions...
متن کاملTesting and Quantifying Collective Intelligence
Among nature and society’s most impressive feats is the ability of organisms and people to collectively accomplish complex goals that none could achieve individually. Ant colonies efficiently find nearoptimal paths to food sources, while anonymous people collaboratively produce sites like Wikipedia. Because such systems are decentralized, they are more resilient and adaptive than groups that re...
متن کاملImprovement of Routing Operation Based on Learning with Using Smart Local and Global Agents and with the Help of the Ant Colony Algorithm
Routing in computer networks has played a special role in recent years. The cause of this is the role of routing in a performance of the networks. The quality of service and security is one of the most important challenges in routing due to lack of reliable methods. Routers use routing algorithms to find the best route to a particular destination. When talking about the best path, we consider p...
متن کاملImprovement of Routing Operation Based on Learning with Using Smart Local and Global Agents and with the Help of the Ant Colony Algorithm
Routing in computer networks has played a special role in recent years. The cause of this is the role of routing in a performance of the networks. The quality of service and security is one of the most important challenges in routing due to lack of reliable methods. Routers use routing algorithms to find the best route to a particular destination. When talking about the best path, we consider p...
متن کاملCollective decision-making in a small society: how the ant Leptothorax albipennis chooses a nest site
Ant colonies possess remarkable abilities to select the best among several courses of action [1]. The most familiar cases involve populous societies of very simple-minded ants allocating workers among food sources [2]. These colonies rely on the positive feedback loops of mass recruitment to discriminate among sources of different quality, even when no individual ant directly compares the alter...
متن کامل