How complex ant societies emerged among ants’ solitary ancestors remains one of the big mysteries of social insect biology. Ants are eusocial, meaning that they have overlapping generations, collective brood care, and reproductive division of labor within the nest. Now, researchers at the Rockefeller University have discovered a way that metabolic interdependence among members of an ant colony may have evolved.;
Ant pupae—which are equivalent to the chrysalis stage of the butterfly—produce a milklike substance derived from molting fluid that is eaten by both adult ants and larvae. Typically, when insects molt, they secrete a fluid that’s simply resorbed by the animal when the molt is complete. But in ants, this nutrition-rich substance serves as a kind of “metabolic currency” within the colony and may have played a role in the ants’ evolutionary transition from a group of loosely cooperating individuals into a truly integrated superorganism, according to research that ...
