Neuroscience
Brain quantity plummets in ‘gamergate’ ants that achieve the power to breed, but rises once more with a fall in fertility.
Ants may be small, but they’ve superhuman skills, equivalent to lifting objects which are many instances their physique weight. Now, researchers have discovered that some ants can even shrink and regrow their brains.
When their queen dies, the feminine employees in a colony of Indian leaping ants (Harpegnathos saltator) interact in weeks-long battles to ascertain new management. The winners, referred to as gamergates, begin to reproduce. Their ovaries grow to be extra energetic — but their brains shrink by about 20%, in keeping with analysis by Clint Penick at Kennesaw State University in Georgia and his colleagues.
To decide whether or not a few of these adjustments are reversible, the scientists suppressed fertility in H. saltator gamergates. In response, most gamergates started searching for meals, a behaviour typical of employee ants dedicated to foraging, and their brains expanded to succeed in a measurement roughly equal to that of foragers’ brains. Because foraging requires superior cognitive skills, mind re-expansion might assist employees to return to forager standing after they lose the battle over copy.
This is the primary time that reversible adjustments in mind measurement on this scale have been noticed in an insect, the researchers say.
