How ants turn information into food

Organisms that can more effectively exploit information about their environments to improve foraging success have a competitive and selective advantage over others. Thus, animals are expected to evolve strategies that use information to improve foraging success. We study how desert seed harvesters use information to improve the rate they collect seeds, which contributes to the colony's fitness. Through field studies and computer simulations, we manipulated the information available to the ants in the spatial distribution of seeds and measured the resulting foraging rates. In field observations, seeds were collected faster when seeds could be found with less information. The increase in foraging rate with clustering was indistinguishable across three related species that vary over an order of magnitude in colony size. Computer simulations show similar systematic increases in foraging rates when information about the food location is communicated among nestmates.