Science Lazy ants make themselves useful in unexpected ways: 40% of the ants do nothing

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If the first thing that comes to mind when you think about ants is "industrious," you might be in for a surprise. In 2015, biologists at the University of Arizona reported that a sizable chunk of the "workers" that make up an ant colony spent the vast majority of their day engaging in one task: doing absolutely nothing.

"They really just sit there," says Daniel Charbonneau, who dedicated his Ph.D. thesis to studying the behavior (or lack thereof) of these lazy ants. "And whenever they're doing anything other than doing nothing, they do chores around the nest, like a bit of brood care here or grooming another worker there."

Observing colonies of ants maintained in the lab, Charbonneau found that an average of 40 percent of individuals are mostly inactive, with some variation between seasons, colonies and species. And his ants, which belong to the species Temnothorax rugatulus, don't appear to be freaks of nature, Charbonneau says, as similar patterns can be observed in other social insects, even honey bees. Charbonneau and his doctoral adviser, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Professor Anna Dornhaus, published those results in 2015. At the time, the researchers could only speculate over the purpose of keeping around hordes of inactive "workers."

In a new paper, published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, authors Charbonneau, Takao Sasaki of the University of Oxford and Dornhaus show for the first time that inactive ants can act as a reserve labor force. When they removed the top 20 percent of most active workers, they found that within a week, they were replaced mostly by individuals belonging to the "lazy" demographic, which stepped up and increased their activity levels to match those of the lost workers.

"This suggests that the colony responds to the loss of highly active workers by replacing them with inactive ones," Charbonneau says.


Read more here. (PhysOrg)
 
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