Ant colonies exemplify how individual units can coalesce to form complex, functional (super)organisms. This talk is about how metabolic division of labor in ant colonies not only underlies collective actions but creates organismal cohesion at the colony level.
Behaviours that transmit metabolised materials from one body to another allow the genome of one individual to influence the fitness of another. In social transfers of care like lactation or egg-laying, this decoupling of resource acquisition, processing, and use over time, space, and across individuals results in metabolic division of labor. Social transfers that enable metabolic division of labor have led to profound shifts in ecology and life-history evolution in that these allow typically parents to process, package and transmit goods to offspring using specifically adapted proteins that lighten metabolic loads, modulate immune responses, and even direct development. Such social transfers enable the entrenchment of metabolic interdependencies, which in some cases can lead to major evolutionary transitions in individuality.
Social insects engage in a multitude of social transfers – the classics of mating and egg laying, but also many forms of trophallaxis (including social regurgitation) with still darker transfers like larval hemolymph feeding and adaptive cannibalism. Social insects also display a range of life histories and degrees of commitment to the colony level, with some species behaving like a society of cooperating individuals with maintained individual reproductive capacity, while others show clear commitment to the colony’s interests. To unravel the causes and consequences of metabolic division of labor in ant colonies, we have been contrasting societal and superorganismal ant species, merging transcriptomics, proteomics, behavioral tracking and genome-scale metabolic models to detail fluxes across the collective. This work has implications for any system with shared goals and collective resource allocation, from multicellular organisms to a fleet of electric vehicles.
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