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foraging ants

FORAGING ANTS, LIVE WEBCAM

  • Local time
  • Location: Wisconsin University, United States
  • Source: UWCurrieLab Ant Cam
  • Info: Live streaming webcam showing a colony of foraging ants. The webcam is in a laboratory at Wisconsin University.

More info: Forager ants make up only about 10% of an entire colony. They collect food to feed their nestmates, facilitated by having a ‘social stomach’ – a crop organ situated before their main stomach. The food collected by a forager ant can either be transferred to its main stomach for digestion or regurgitated from the social stomach and shared with other ants through a kind of mouth-to-mouth process known as trophallaxis.

Individual forager ants base their decision to forage on information received from nestmates (social information). Transmission of this information can either be in the form of direct physical interactions such as antennation or indirect exchange of information such as laying down pheromone trails.