There's nothing quite like drinking with friends, and it turns out ants have their own type of social drinking as well.
Ant's drink of choice is a kind of milk that comes out of their children's mouths. Everyone in the colony partakes from the newest hatchlings to adults.
There is a specific phase in the development of an ant pupae. It appears to be a mixture of fluids, which include degraded products of the pupa's old cuticle along with the enzymes that break it down. Oh my gosh! It was delicious.
The first few days after hatching are when the larvae rely on the fluid to survive.
Although it's not known what it does to the adults, we're confident that it impacts metabolism.
A study from @DanielKronauer's lab shows that a newly discovered "social fluid" appears to unite ant colonies across developmental stages into one superorganism. #RockefellerScience https://t.co/tnpL0QQZxe pic.twitter.com/77XHaqlzb6
— Rockefeller University (@RockefellerUniv) November 30, 2022
Rockefeller University's Orli Snir noticed this drinking ritual while researching how social isolation affects ants. The baby ants were left alone while the researchers removed the fluid for some of them.
It was striking.
The researchers wrote that if they didn't remove fluid from isolated pupae, they drowned.
Some pups that were kept in used nest boxes succumbed to infections. The people who returned back to the colony as soon as their milk came back had a high rate of survival.
In the colony context, pupae depend on adults to remove the secretion and die if they don't.
The baby ants produce their'milk' during their most seemingly dormant phase of development. This phase coincides with the hatching of the next group of worms.
The team was able to show the hatchlings how to drink the milk.
They are picked up by their adult caretakers and placed on their older siblings for a drink. The baby was more likely to die if they didn't get the fluid in the first few days.
The team identified hormones and other substances in the milk.
The same process was found in at least one species across five major ant subfamilies in the initial experiments.
Early in ant evolution or preceding ant evolution it probably evolved.
Individual ants are so interwoven with each other within their colony that they are often likened to collectively functioning as one organism.
The researchers want to find out how the pupa fluid influences the social structure.
"Ant use of this fluid creates a dependency between different stages of development." It shows what ant colonies are really like.
This isn't the first strange excretion ants have been caught with, but it's an amazing new find since this group of animals has been studied for over a century.
The research was published in a journal.
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