DOI: 10.5061/dryad.dfn2z358r
title: Data from: Ant social network structure is highly conserved

description: 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 &gt;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. The deeply conserved two-community structure highlights that
 the most fundamental behavioral division of labor in social insects is
 between workers that stay in the nest to rear brood, and those that leave
 the nest to forage. This division has parallels across the animal kingdom
 in systems of biparental care and likely represents the most readily
 evolvable form of division of labor.
description: 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)
description: # 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 head of ant one contacted the body of ant two, and '2-1' implies that the body of ant one contacted the head of ant two). 'Md' files contain information for each ant - the corresponding tag identity at multiple time-points, body length (measured in pixels - 'head_tail_px'), and number of times detected 'RandMod' files contain soft modularity scores for each network for each iteration in which the networks were randomly reshuffled 'SoftModularity.csv' contains soft modularity scores for each network for community numbers 2, 3, 4 and 5 Corrseponding code is provided in this repository and on Github at: [https://github.com/MO-Katy/AntSocialNetworkComparative](https://github.com/MO-Katy/AntSocialNetworkComparative)