Collective regulatory stock management and spatiotemporal dynamics of the food flow in ants.

The organization of complex societies requires constant information flow between individuals. The shape of the food web organizes itself according to the spatial distribution of the individuals and of the stocks. To understand how the spatial organization of the food stocks changes with the colony needs, we monitored the flow of radiolabeled sugar solution inside an ant nest at different degrees of starvation. The spatial dynamics of the food flow revealed stable patterns and fine-tuning regulation of the feeding process. The complex collective regulatory stock management task can be reproduced by a surprising simple model that integrates a positive and a negative feedback proportional to the number of ants that already received food. Spatial analysis of the food distribution showed that sucrose is heterogeneously stocked among individuals and also heterogeneously consumed. Furthermore, we observed a regular spatial structure, leading to centralization of the stocks: heavily loaded individuals being at the center of the cluster and weakly loaded individuals at its periphery. The centralization of both resources and information in self-organized systems might be a widespread phenomenon that deserves further studies.