Now listen to part of a lecture on this topic in a biology class.
Ok, so here's a good example of this among ants. Ants live together in these large nests and certain ants, the forager ants, have a particular job to do. They go out each day to look for food items; leaves, seeds, fruit, things like that and then these ants bring them back to the nest, so all the other ants can eat them. Now, the forager ants don't just bring back whatever they may happen to find. They bring back different kinds of food. For example, adult ants normally like to eat things that are rich in sugar because they need energy to carry on other activities in the nest, so at a time when the colony is composed mostly of adult ants, the forager ants look for pieces of fruit and other sugar - rich items. They bring these back to the nest for the adult ants to eat to get the energy they need, but there is a time of the year when baby ants are born. Now, the baby ants need a different kind of food. They need food that will help them grow into adults, so their food needs to be rich in protein. So now the forager ants do something different. They start to gather more food items that are rich in protein, like certain types of leaves or mushrooms. This way the young ants get the protein they need to help them grow.
Using the example of ants, explain the concept of communal nutrition.
The passage talks about a notion called communal nutrition. This means some kind of social insects living in large groups will have different members to do different tasks in order to make the whole group function well. The man in the lecture raises ants as an example. He mentions that ants live in big nests and there is a certain kind of ants responsible for finding food. When there is the season when adult ants occupy the largest part in their group, these food-finding ants will mostly bring back food that contains lots of sugar. Because adult ants need sugar most. But when there are many baby ants, these food-finding ants will bring back more protein-contained food such as leaves and mushrooms.
