Most ant species are born in royals. But for Indian spring ants, female workers can fight for the crown.
The catch? The winner becomes queen, but his brain shrinks as well.
In a study published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists discovered that Indian spring ants could shrink and regrow their brains within a few weeks – a feat never seen before in insects. also is incredibly rare in the animal. kingdom.
“Indian spring ants are particularly unique,” said Clint Penick, assistant professor of biology at Kennesaw State University and one of the study’s authors. “They shed part of their brain mass to save energy and push resources from the brain to the ovaries for reproduction.”
The Indian jumping ants, also known as Harpegnathos souteraar, are thumb-long arthropods known for their tong-like jaws and large black eyes. And as their name suggests, these ants can be found in the forests of India where they hunt and jump a few inches in search of prey.
As in many ant colonies, the nest of an Indian spring ant contains a queen and thousands of workers who clean the royal eggs, search for food and feed the larvae.
But the agreements stop there.
The lifespan of most ant colonies depends on the lifespan of the queen. When an Indian jumping ant queen dies, more than half of the colony’s female workers take part in a month-long ‘tournament’ to fight for a seat at the top, Penick said. Indian spring ant colonies can have numerous queens.
As hundreds of female workers quarrel with each other, they begin to undergo a physiological change that transforms them into queen-like workers, called gamergates – “not the online harassment campaign,” he said, referring to a harassment campaign targeting several women in the video game industry has. in 2014.
A small group of eight to ten workers will emerge victorious while the losers do their jobs again, Penick said. The winners will then activate their ovaries to take on the previous role of the queen, ‘essentially an egg-laying factory’, according to Penick.
During this period, the ovaries of gamergate will grow five times larger, while their brains will shrink to 25 percent compared to the anatomy of the workers.
“The colony will survive, and essentially in this state they could theoretically become immortal,” he said.
Penick said the Indian spring ant colonies used in the study were the same as those collected in India nearly 20 years ago and that it was the first epigenome for the species to be consecutive.
At one point, he and the other researchers, according to him, became interested in determining whether the shrinkage of the brain was reversible, and created an experiment to isolate newly formed gamer holes from the colony.
He said he expected them to die, but what they discovered was that the Indian spring ants could regenerate the size of the brains and shrink their ovaries to the size of the workers.
“It was amazing,” Penick said. “If we lose brain tissue, we can reproduce some brain cells, but it does not fully recover and grows back to its original state. It is gone forever.”
The ants have become a ‘model of developmental plasticity’ that can provide details about ‘which genes control this phenomenon and which parts of the brain have the ability to grow back’, he said.
Penick added that he believes queens can return to their original form because the losers of the duel for the crown would need to return to their responsibilities as workers.
“They need more brain capacity,” he said. “Their main task is to leave the colony, sometimes meters away, to look for food and bring it back to the nest.”
“They need to remember how to find their way home.”
