“Ants reduce the investment per worker in one of the most nutritionally expensive tissues for the collective good,” Matt explains. “They’re moving from self-investment to a distributed workforce.”
power of collective
The researchers believe the pattern they observed in ants reflects a more universal trend in the evolution of social complexity. The transition from solitary life to complex societies echoes the transition from single-celled organisms to multicellular organisms.
In a single-celled organism, a cell must be a “jack-of-all-trades” performing every function necessary for survival. However, in a multicellular organism, individual cells often become simpler and more specialized, relying on the collective for protection and resources.
“It’s a pattern that echoes the evolution of multicellularity, where cooperative units can be individually simpler than a single cell, yet collectively capable of far greater complexity,” says Matt. Still, the question of whether investing less in individuals to promote collectivism makes sense for creatures other than ants remains open, and it’s probably not about nutritional economics as much as it is about sex.
expendable servants
The study focused on ants that already have a reproductive division of labor, where workers do not reproduce. This social structure is probably the key prerequisite for the cheap staffing strategy. For the team, this is why we have not, at least so far, found similar evolutionary patterns in more complex social creatures like wolves, which live in packs — or in humans, who have surprisingly complex societies. Both wolves and humans are social, but maintain a high level of individual selfishness with regard to reproduction. Ant workers can be expendable because they do not pass on their own genes – they are essentially extensions of the queen’s reproductive strategy.
Before looking for signs of ant-like approaches to quality versus quantity dilemmas in other species, the team wanted to take an even closer look at ants. Economo, Matt and their colleagues want to extend their analysis to other ant tissues, such as the nervous system and muscles, to see whether the cheapening of individuals extends beyond the exoskeleton. They are also looking at ant genomes to see what genetic innovations have allowed for the shift from quality to quantity. “We still need to do a lot of work to understand the evolution of ants,” says Matt.
Science advancement. 2025. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adx8068
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