Nutrition in social insects

International audienceNutrition concerns physiological and behavioral processes involved in the acquisition of nutrients and other chemicals required for energy, growth, tissue maintenance, and reproduction. While some components are synthetized by the insects themselves, many are ingested with the food, which for social insects can be as diverse as plant leaves, flower pollen and nectar, honeydew, dead arthropods, or even wood. The challenge for insects is to ingest these foods in appropriate amounts and balance to avoid harmful excesses or deficits of nutrients or toxins. For an individual, nutritional regulation is achieved through a complex interplay between foraging decisions (e.g., based on learning and memory), preingestive processing of food (e.g., enzymatic degradation in the mouthparts), and postingestive assimilation (e.g., absorption and differential utilization of nutrients). For a colony, food collection, processing, assimilation, and excretion are decentralized processes achieved collectively by different individuals with divergent nutritional need