The Incredible Shrinking And Growing Brains Of Indian Jumping Ants wksu.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wksu.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Indian Jumping Ants Can Shrink, Restore Their Brain, Study Finds
The study says this feature is used by the female members of the species to prepare for reproduction. By Edited by Gadgets 360 Newsdesk | Updated: 17 April 2021 19:48 IST
Photo Credit: Clint Penick
The ability to increase or shrink brain size is linked to where the female stands in colony s hierarchy
Highlights
Indian jumping ants can shrink their brains by nearly 20 percent
It could become the first insects to exhibit this ability
Despite being the most evolved species, there are some things we humans simply cannot do. Like, change the size of our brain. Over the years, it was found that certain members of the animal kingdom possess the ability to increase their brain size. And now, a new study has revealed that Indian jumping ants can also do so. What makes them distinct is the fact that these ants cannot just increase their brain size but also revert it to the previous state
Image Credit: Earth.com
Female members of the Indian jumping ants species, a species found only in India, are not only capable of reducing the size of their brains, but can also grow their brains back if needed, a new study has found.
Published in
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences journal, the study confirmed a phenomenon that hadn’t been observed in the insect kingdom before: that ants have the ability to completely transform themselves at the adult stage.
“Indian jumping ants are particularly unique… They shed a part of their brain mass to conserve energy and push resources from the brain to the ovaries for reproduction,” Clint Penick, assistant professor of biology at the Kennesaw State University in the U.S., who was involved in the study, told NBC News.
The humble Indian jumping ant is less than an inch long and lives in a colony
When a queen dies female Indian jumping ants compete to replace the matriarch
In doing this they release hormones to shrink their brain by 20% to save energy
Energy is sent to the ovaries which swell to 5x their size to make more eggs
But if the new queen is usurped and becomes a worker again, the changes are completely reversible
These ants can shrink and regrow their brains
New research on Indian jumping ants shows they can undergo dramatic reversible changes previously unknown in insects.
ByTroy Farah
Email
For most ant colonies, there’s a straightforward hierarchy: a single queen lays all the eggs, while a caste system of workers manages everything else foraging for food, nursing baby ants, going to war, and so on. Only males and queens can reproduce, and the rest of the ants are sterile. If the queen dies, the colony usually does, too.
Things are different for the Indian jumping ant, a species with forceps-like jaws and large black eyes that inhabits forests along India’s western coast. In these colonies, if the queens die, workers host bizarre competitions in which the winner becomes the monarch and capable of producing eggs. The triumphant female ant’s ovaries expand and her brain shrinks up to 25 percent.