New discovery: Ants 'vomit' into each other's mouths to form social relations

New research shows that the act of vomiting into each other's mouth is not only to pass food to each other, but also to form social relationships.

According to livescience.com, in the new study, Adria LeBoeuf, director of the Social Fluids laboratory at the University of Friborg in Switzerland, says most insects have an fore, mid and hindgut. With social insects, however, the forebrain has become a kind of 'social stomach'. The food in the midgut and hindgut is digested, and the food in the forebrain is shared.

 When they vomit food into each other's mouths, ants don't just exchange nutrients.

The behavior of exchanging food into another's mouth by regurgitating food is very common in highly social species such as ants. In one such exchange, nutrients and proteins are passed from one animal's 'social stomach' to another. Through a series of these food exchanges, ants form a social circulatory system that connects members of the ant colony with each other.

Woodpecker ants are constantly passing these nutrients to each other. In a colony of ants, there can be 20 such exchanges of food in just one minute. An ant colony has at least thousands of ants.

Ms LeBoeuf said: 'Five years ago, we published research that said that food exchange behaviors are not just about passing food to each other, but they are also transmitting hormones, a telltale sign of ants from the same nest. , small pieces of RNA and other things'.

So when ants vomit food into each other's mouths, ants don't just exchange nutrients. Instead, they are creating digestive social networks, in which information and energy circulate continuously through the nest for the ants that need it. This phenomenon is very similar to the way the human brain secretes hormones into the circulatory system to reach the liver.

An ant colony is not only a collection of individual ants, but also a 'nest super organism', i.e. the entire ant colony acts as an organism. Just as the human body has tissues and organs that perform tasks to achieve a common goal, ant colonies with different tasks can be thought of as a part, a tissue of a super organism. There are ants looking for food, there are ants taking care of their young and there are ants digging nests…

To help understand why ants share food in the gut first, the scientists explored whether the proteins they exchange are related to individual roles in the nest or to the life cycle of the ants. ant's nest.

In most recent experiments, LeBoeuf and her colleagues analyzed the food in the social stomachs of woodpecker ants in both wild and laboratory ant nests. Through the samples, they identified 519 proteins that were transmitted in the anthill, 27 in every sample.

Worker ants seem to forage for food, transform that food into specific proteins and then pass it on to other ants. As the nest gets bigger, more nutrients are stored.

Adult ants don't even need to eat, just slowly digesting these stored proteins.

The results of the above study show that some members of the ant colony can do cyclic work for the benefit of others. There are foods that are ingested by one animal but appear in another and the researchers say this is very interesting.

Still, many questions remain. For example, the team found that workers have higher concentrations of stored proteins than workers, but workers produce these proteins more quickly.

Studying systems such as nutrient exchange in ants could help scientists better understand how circadian work is divided in single organisms.

The study was published November 2 in the journal eLife.