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A fluid role in ant society as adults give larvae ‘milk’ from pupae

Parental-care behaviours include mammalian lactation to provide milk for offspring. The discovery that adult ants harvest nutritious fluid from pupae and give larvae this fluid reveals social feeding that aids colony success.
  1. Patrizia d’Ettorre

    1. Patrizia d’Ettorre is at the Laboratory of Experimental and Comparative Ethology, UR4443, University Sorbonne Paris Nord, Villetaneuse 93430, France, and at Institut Universitaire de France, Paris.

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  2. Kazuki Tsuji

    1. Kazuki Tsuji is in the Department of Subtropical Agro-Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Agriculture, University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa 903-0213, Japan, and at the United Graduate School of Agricultural Sciences, Kagoshima University, Japan.

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Reproduction is costly, and typically entails evolutionary conflicts between parents and offspring, such as in the relative investment of resources1. However, cooperation between family members is also common in highly social animals. Writing in Nature, Snir et al.2 report their use of a series of carefully designed experiments that reveal a previously undocumented role for pupae in the social dynamics of ant colonies.

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Nature 612, 405-406 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03722-4

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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