Queen ants, the only individuals in a colony that can lay eggs, can also live for decades—up to 10 times longer than workers. But for years, scientists didn’t understand why. A new study published yesterday (September 1) in Science proposes an explanation: The insulin signaling pathway of reproductive ants differs from that of workers in a way that blocks aging.
Claude Desplan, a neurobiologist at New York University who coauthored the study, says what attracted his team to study ants was the ability of workers to live normal lives while the queens who lay eggs live much longer. This, he says, contradicted a known tradeoff among animals between longevity and increased reproduction. Desplan and his colleagues decided to study the mechanism behind this.
They knew that in the absence of queens, workers can transition into pseudoqueens known as gamergates, and these gamergates can also switch back to their original caste ...
