Ants create chemical trails to guide their friends to food

Usually, we see ants forming a single file, following a scent trail to a food source and returning back to their nest. However, what happens when there are multiple food sources available?

Well, the ants in this scenario create a network of trails connecting their nest to all the available food sources. This is the conclusion of a fascinating new study from Florida State University.

Bhargav Karamched, an assistant professor of mathematics at Florida State University (FSU), is the lead researcher.

Focus of the research

“Social insect behavior has fascinated the biological community for a long time. The collective behavior of insects can be used to achieve more complicated outcomes than possible for individuals,” noted the researchers.

“This is especially important for ant species that rely on communication via pheromone to coordinate activity.”

Working in FSU’s Institute of Molecular Biophysics, Karamched and his team have created a pioneering model that explains the phenomenon of trail formation to multiple food sources.

Ants with multiple food sources

“The power of mathematics is that we can devise models that reproduce experimentally observed data and make concrete predictions about what will happen next,” Karamched noted.

“In this case, we uncovered something that hasn’t been described well by other models: if an ant has access to multiple food sources from its nest, it will initially make multiple trails to each of the sources.”

The research has unveiled how ants, when presented with multiple food sources, initially make multiple trails to each source.

Graduate student and study lead author Sean Hartman expressed his lifelong interest in mathematics which led him to pursue research in this field.

“I was intrigued by ant trail research that Dr. Karamched shared with me and became interested in pursuing further research on it and creating models based on this previous work,” he said.

Secret behind the ants’ food hunt

For ants, foraging is not just a daily activity, it’s a necessity for their survival. They use chemical pheromones for self-organization.

Once a food source is detected, the ant secretes these chemicals as a trail marker for its fellow ants.

Karamched’s team factored this behavior into their computational simulations which also showed that ants eventually prefer the food source closer to their nest in an environment with multiple sources.

The researchers divided ants into two groups: foragers who wander in search of food, and returners who head straight for the nest after finding food.

“These subpopulations behave differently, as foragers tend to wander around in search of food while returners always return directly to the nest after finding food, making their motion less stochastic or random,” Karamched explained.

The role of pheromones

The research team considered the concentration of pheromones secreted by the ants – the higher the concentration, the stronger the scent trail for others to follow.

Interestingly, ants returning from a food source close to the nest secrete fewer pheromones. Hartman’s coding simulations produced insights into this pheromone-based decision-making process.

“Once my code was fully tested and accurate, multiple trail formations became distinct and were easily understandable,” Hartman said.

“It was so cool to see how equidistant food sources could maintain multiple food trails as an equilibrium. If one food source was just slightly closer to the ants’ nest, the ants would eventually form one singular trail to the closest source. It was at this moment that it felt all our hard work finally paid off.”

Using chemical signals to communicate

The model devised by Karamched’s team isn’t just limited to ants. Its simplicity and focus on pheromone gradients make it applicable to other organisms and biological systems that communicate using pheromones.

This could include bacteria, slime molds, other insects, fish, and even some reptiles and mammals.

According to Karamched, the fundamental pheromone concentration gradient is the underpinning factor that analyzes collective behavior.

“From a microbial level to complex organisms, using this chemical signaling to communicate allows certain organisms to coordinate activity on huge spatial scales, which is fascinating.”

The seemingly simple act of ants foraging for food, decoded with mathematics and simulations, offers new insights into the world of these hardworking insects.

The study is published in the Journal of Mathematical Biology.

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