With my immensely shallow knowledge of the animal kingdom, I have often thought of insect colonies (such as ants and bees) to be rigid structured hierarchies where specialists were born into their roles. I've often thought of this in the context of developing highly independent and functional teams within organisations.
The team reared six colonies of carpenter ants (Camponotus fellah) in the lab and tagged each worker with paper containing a unique barcode-like symbol. The colonies — each comprising more than 100 ants — lived in flat enclosures filmed by overhead cameras. A computer automatically recognized the tags and recorded each individual’s position twice per second (see video below). Over 41 days, the researchers collected more than 2.4 billion readings and documented 9.4 million interactions between the workers.
The workers move between jobs as they get older — nurses are generally younger than cleaners, which are younger than foragers. Honeybees go through similar transitions from young nurses to older foragers, but this study provides the clearest evidence yet that ants do the same.
Nevertheless, these career changes were not clear-cut. “You can find very old nurses and very young foragers,” says Mersch.
