Ants Change 'Careers' As They Age, According To New Study [VIDEO]

We all know that an ant colony is built around the queen, but because the rest of the ants in the colony look so similar it has been hard for researchers to distinguish among different worker ants.

But, as Nature reports, researchers at University of Lausanne in Switzerland have developed a system that follows the movements of carpenter ants in a laboratory setting by placing a tiny computer chip on the ants' backs and using data reorders to track their movements.

The scientific community is hailing the tracking system a breakthrough, but what's more fascinating is what researchers learned by tracking the ants: they divide themselves into highly organized groups. This behavior has been observed in bees, but this is the first time it has been observed in ants.

Researchers found that the worker ants had specific roles within the colony and that as the ants aged they changed roles.

Taking care of the queen, foraging for food and cleaning the colony defined the social groups for the carpenter ants used in the study.

Because the researchers knew the age of all the ants in their study, they were able to make detailed observations about how the social roles of the ants changed over time.

The ants that nursed the queen tended to be young. Slightly older ants were responsible for cleaning the colony and the older set of ants were tasked with foraging for food outside of the colony.

Professor Laurent Keller and colleagues studied the six separate ant colonies in the lab to obtain their data.

"We found that around a third of the workers were nurses, which almost always stayed with the queen and eggs. Another third were cleaners and the rest were foragers, collecting food outside the colony," Laurent said, according to the Daily Mail, which also published photos of the ants.

"We also found that they tend to graduate from one group to another as they age, although the career changes were not clear-cut. We did find very old nurses and young foragers. We also found that the ants interacted mostly with workers from the same group. They don't try to interact with workers from another group."

If you know French you can listen to Laurent talk about his work in this video.

If not, the video below will at least show you what the worker ants are up to.