  Nutritional regulation by ants emerges from a distributed process: food is
collected by a small fraction of workers, stored within the crops of
individuals, and spreads via local ant-to-ant interactions. The precise
individual level underpinnings of this collective regulation have remained
unclear mainly due to difficulties in measuring food within ants crops. Here we
image fluorescent liquid food in individually tagged Camponotus sanctus ants,
and track the real-time food flow from foragers to their gradually satiating
colonies. We show how the feedback between colony satiation level and food
inflow is mediated by individual crop loads; specifically, the crop loads of
recipient ants control food flow rates, while those of foragers regulate the
frequency of foraging trips. Interestingly, these effects do not rise from pure
physical limitations of crop capacity. Our findings suggest that the emergence
of food intake regulation does not require individual foragers to assess the
global state of the colony.
