Queen ants learn to be single mothers

If there is an animal that knows about hierarchies, it is the ant. In all species, the more than 13,000 that exist, these small social insects are organized by the division of tasks: the queens lay the eggs, the males fertilize, and the workers—wingless and sterile females—are in charge of caring for the offspring. , search for food and build the nest. When a colony is founded, the monarch takes custody of its first daughters. Then the leader specializes in laying eggs and does not assume caretaker roles again. Or so it was thought.

New research has discovered that if the workers disappear, and since the males usually die after reproducing, the queen learns to be a single mother and returns to caring for her babies herself. The finding, published this Tuesday in the journal

Functional Ecology

,

challenges the prevailing view that queen specialization is innate and irreversible.

“We expected that the queen's specialization would be robust and not dependent on environmental conditions,” explains Romain Libbrecht, author of the study. A team of researchers from the National Center for Scientific Research of France, led by this biologist, has now shown that the work of the workers is the factor that triggers and conditions the queen to stop caring for the offspring and take care of laying eggs. .

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Ants also use perimeter closure to protect the colony.

Traditionally, this division of labor—within the superorganism that is a colony—has been assumed “as something fixed,” adds Xim Cerdá, a biologist at the Department of Ethology and Biodiversity Conservation of the CSIC, who has not participated in the study. The investigation; However, it suggests that this specialization “is more flexible than normally assumed and can be reversed,” says Cerdá. Libbrecht agrees. For his team, the most surprising thing was to discover that specialized queens become unspecialized very quickly if faced with the absence of workers, even after several years of dedicating themselves exclusively to laying eggs.

The finding is the result of 17 experiments and more than 3,000 hours of video recordings, using the common garden ant (

Lasius niger

) as a model. By isolating the queen, they were able to study the duration of care for the eggs and larvae in different scenarios: with and without food, with and without young workers, and also by removing the workers after having had them for 30 or 38 months. Libbrecht details that the most challenging part was being able to experimentally manipulate the presence of workers around queens that had not yet produced any, because when they were from different colonies they attacked each other. “The solution we found was to use very young workers, less than 8 or 10 hours old,” explains the author of the study.

After analyzing the data collected, they found that queens that have been isolated recover non-reproductive behaviors, that is, they return to work caring for their offspring. They do it right away, sometimes in less than 24 hours; at most, up to three days after the absence of workers. And once they have adopted that role of single caring mothers, it is enough to return a couple of the workers to their work for the queen to stop caring for the young and dedicate herself again exclusively to egg production. Of course, these workers must be able to do their job, because if the workers are nearby, but are prevented from carrying out their duties of caring for the brood, the queen does it in her place. Cerdá adds: “Only the real presence of workers induces behavioral change.” To confirm the results, they finally analyzed another species,

Temnothorax nylanderi

,

and found similar behaviors.

The discovery highlights the crucial role of the social environment in the development of behaviors.

Since very little is known about the emergence and maintenance of queen specialization, and the process of organization, obtaining new information “may change our understanding of how the division of labor is regulated and how it arose and evolved in the first place,” assures Libbrecht. Her discovery has the potential to shed light on the societies of other insects—including those of bumblebees, bees, termites and wasps—which, like ant colonies, are considered highly specialized superorganisms.

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