Nutritional regulation by ants emerges from a distributed process: food is collected by a small fraction of workers, stored within the crops of individuals, and spread via local ant-to-ant interactions. The precise individual-level underpinnings of this collective regulation have remained unclear mainly due to difficulties in measuring food within ants’ crops. Here we image fluorescent liquid food in individually tagged Camponotus sanctus ants and track the real-time food flow from foragers to their gradually satiating colonies. We show how the feedback between colony satiation level and food inflow is mediated by individual crop loads; specifically, the crop loads of recipient ants control food flow rates, while those of foragers regulate the frequency of foraging-trips. Interestingly, these effects do not rise from pure physical limitations of crop capacity. Our findings suggest that the emergence of food intake regulation does not require individual foragers to assess the global state of the colony.

中文翻译：

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个体作物负荷为蚁群的集体食物摄入提供局部控制

蚂蚁的营养调节来自一个分布式过程：食物由一小部分工人收集，储存在个人的农作物中，并通过本地蚂蚁与蚂蚁的相互作用传播。这种集体监管的精确个体层面的基础仍不清楚，主要是由于难以测量蚂蚁作物中的食物。在这里，我们在单独标记的 Camponotus sanctus 蚂蚁中对荧光液体食物进行成像，并跟踪从觅食者到逐渐饱足的蚁群的实时食物流。我们展示了群体饱食水平和食物流入之间的反馈如何由个体作物负荷调节；具体来说，受体蚂蚁的作物负荷控制食物流量，而觅食者的作物负荷调节觅食旅行的频率。有趣的是，这些影响并非来自作物生产能力的纯粹物理限制。我们的研究结果表明，食物摄入调节的出现并不需要个体觅食者来评估群体的全球状况。