Ant social network structure is highly conserved

The ecological dominance of social insects makes studying their colony organization fundamentally important to scientists studying collective systems. The recent combination of automated behavioral tracking and social network analysis has deepened our understanding of many aspects of colony social organization. We know how social organization is influenced by group size, genetic heterogeneity, pathogens and symbionts. However, because studies have typically investigated the influence of a given variable on the social network structure of a particular species, we know little about interspecific variation in network structure. Here we conduct a comparative network analysis across five ant species from five sub-families, separated by >100 MY. We find that social network structure is highly conserved. All species form modular networks, with two social communities, a similar distribution of individuals between the communities, and a similar mapping of task performance onto the communities..., For each of 25 colonies (1 queen & 100 workers) we performed 1 week of automated tracking, extracting coordinates and orientations for each tag multiple times per second.
Around each tag we annotated a head region and used overlap of head regions to infer pairwise social interactions.
We quantified each individuals space-use (in particular time distribution between nest and foraging boxes), , # Ant social network structure is highly conserved

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.dfn2z358r](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.dfn2z358r)

The data here are collected via automated tracking of 25 ant colonies (5 of each of 5 species). The tracking time-calibrated outputs coordinated and orientations for each individual.

## Description of the data and file structure

'Edgelist' files contain interaction counts for each pair of individuals

'Forage' files count the number of visits each individual paid to each hexagon in the foraging arena

'Nest' files count the number of visits each individual paid to each hexagon in the nest

'Interaction' files contain all pairwise interactions (each interaction is a row). The identities of the involved ants ('id1' and 'id2'), the start and end times of the interaction, the box in which the interaction occured ('space' - 1 = nest box; 2 = foraging box), and the types of contact between the ants that occured (1 = head, 2 = body. So '1-2' implies that the...