Swapping Spit Helps Ants Share Metabolic Labor
Published:18 Nov.2021 Source:eLife
Ant colonies use fluids passed mouth-to-mouth to create a colony-wide metabolism, shows a study published in eLife. The discovery is the latest to suggest that social insect colonies function in a similar way to a single organism made up of many individuals and provides new insights on how they accomplish this.
"Individual ants have two stomachs -- one for digesting their own food and another one that comes first, a 'social stomach' for storing fluids that they share with other ants in their colony. These fluid exchanges allow ants to share food and other important proteins that the ants themselves produce," says senior author Adria LeBoeuf, Assistant Professor and leader of the Laboratory of Social Fluids at the Department of Biology, University of Fribourg, Switzerland.