According to new research, carpenter ants give each other wet, slobbery kisses to make sure the colony keeps working like a well-oiled social machine.
Each individual in the colony has what they need to perform their role in the community, whether foragers, nurses, or queens.
An individual ant has two stomachs, one for digesting their own food and the other for storing fluids that they share with other ants in their colony, explains evolutionary biologist Adria LeBoeuf from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.
The fluid exchanges allow ants to share their food and other important parts of their body.
The function of these social fluids is still largely unknown, although fruit flies are thought to use saliva to create a social circulatory system.
Researchers have found that the social fluids can be linked to an individual's role in the colony.
The saliva of carpenter ants was filled with different types of biomarkers depending on the colony's conditions.
The researchers found a total of 519 different types of proteins across 70 colonies and 40 individual fluid samples.
Younger colonies passed saliva more often filled with saliva involved in rapid sugar processing, while older colonies spread their saliva needed for growth.
The saliva found in mature ant colonies is similar to hormones flowing through a body, only in this case the colony is a superorganism.
The ants that care for the queen's young, the 'nurses', had a higher abundance of stress-related proteins in their social stomachs.
This suggests selfless ants are giving live-extending molecule to the nurses who need to live longer to raise the next generation. Some ants are doing hard labor never to see the benefits.
More research is needed to figure out how each shared protein affects the colony. The findings of the current paper suggest that kisses in ant colonies are a good model for understanding how animal societies evolved divisions of labor.
It is difficult to measure how much work is shared between cells.
"Here, the ants pass things around in a way that we can easily access what they are sharing."
Who knew so much information could be conveyed in a wet kiss?
The study was published in a magazine.
