Individual crop loads provide local control for collective food intake in ant colonies.

Nutritional regulation by ants emerges from a distributed process: food is collected by a small fraction of workers, stored within the crops of individuals, and spread via local ant-to-ant interactions. The precise individual-level underpinnings of this collective regulation have remained unclear mainly due to difficulties in measuring food within ants' crops. Here we image fluorescent liquid food in individually tagged ants and track the real-time food flow from foragers to their gradually satiating colonies.