Hi:

Like most casual observers of insects, I am familiar with the explanation of how ants use pheromones as trail markers to guide them both to sources of food and back to their nests. In studying a recent photo that I took, what I found to be intriguing is that that some of the ants navigate to the end of a chicken bone to consume the remaining flesh, while other ants are content to feast on the crackers that are more accessible. I would have thought that the ants would have first consumed the more accessible food source (the crackers) before venturing out after the less accessible food source at the end of the bone.

Here is the image that stimulated my thinking on this issue:

Here is a link to a larger version of the image.

Comments anyone?

Thanks,

Bill Angel

Baltimore, Maryland

Perhaps the chicken was viewed as a higher quality food source? There was certainly room for more ants on the crackers so it wasn't an excess of labor or lack of resources issue.

I agree that it would make sense for the ants to be able to direct the foragers to the higher quality food sources. The issue would be what mechanism would facilitate this direction. An interesting article that I found on this subject is Communication in Ants.

According to this article, the ants might lay down a trail composed of several different pheromones, the particular combination serving to direct the foragers to the higher value food sources. So the ants might not simply follow a single simple one component pheromone trail out and back to their nest.