Collective intelligence in the face of nutritional challenges in ants

10 January 2020 par webmaster
A study led by Audrey Dussutour, in collaboration with Eniko Csata and Jacques Gautrais, published in Current Biology, demonstrate that ants match their foraging decisions to their nutritional needs and overcome complex nutritional deficiencies.

An individual-based model demonstrates that these impressive feats of nutritional compensation emerge from simple individual decisions. These results show that, by adjusting their feeding behavior at the individual level, ants sustain homeostasis at the colony level.

In ants, food is brought back to the nest by only 10% of its members: the harvesters. The food is then regurgitated and shared among all the members of the colony. How do the harvesters deal with food imbalances in the colony?

Reference :

Ant foragers compensate for the nutritional deficiencies in the colony

Csata E, Gautrais J, Bach A, Blanchet J, Ferrante J, Fournier F, Lesvesque T, Simpson SJ & Dussutour A

Current Biology 12 décembre 2019  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.11.019

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