The economic strategies of superorganisms

Economic principles can be applied to biological life to understand how resource allocation strategies maximise evolutionary fitness ¹ . This approach has been applied in plants under the global slow-fast leaf economic spectrum which describes investment and return of carbon and nutrients in leaves ¹ . Whether this applies to other taxa, indicating general principles, remains untested. We advance generality in economic theories of life by showing that a slow-fast spectrum captures the resource economics of a globally dominant group of superorganisms, the ants. Like plants, ants acquire resources through modular units, the workers. Here, we collect traits from ant workers of 123 species across large-scale environmental gradients. Ants trade-off investment in biomass, chemical elements (nitrogen, phosphorus), energy (metabolic rate) and worker number, against assimilation rates (resource revenue) and lifespan. This superorganism economic spectrum does not vary across environmental gradients, rather, both slow and fast strategies persist amongst co-occurring species. High phylogenetic conservatism suggests early lineages of ants diverged in their economic strategies and subsequently diversified, locking in fundamental templates of investment and resource return. The remarkable similarities in economic strategies employed by ants and plants for resource acquisition and use suggest that there may be common principles underlying the rules of life.