According to scientists, the division of labor in ant colonies has nothing to do with age and is apparently dictated by random factors.
Female ants either remain in the nest to look after the queen and larvae or go out in search of food. Researchers at the University of Lausanne wanted to know if only older, more seasoned ants carried out foraging duties.
Researchers discovered that age had little effect on how an ant ascended the corporate ladder after observing tens of millions of social interactions among 500 ants for 100 days.
Every female worker had the same chance (around 3% ) of being promoted from the nursery to a foraging role.
“We are the first to show that role changes in an animal society are regulated by stochastic [random] processes. This discovery has important consequences for our understanding of the regulation of work in social insects,” said Laurent Keller, a professor at the university’s Department of Ecology and Evolution.
The most effective way of maintaining the correct balance between nursery and forager workers tends to be randomness. Researchers discovered that if conditions required it, foragers would return to the nest to work in the nursery.
