Aside from a select few animals, such as the rougheye rockfish, all are affected by senescence, also known as the natural course of aging. Now, scientists from Boston University have added another animal to the list of those that avoid this process: minor workers from the ant species Pheidole dentate. The study reveals that P. dentate minor workers, which typically live for up to 140 days in the laboratory, do not show any signs of age-related decline prior to their death. Due to the highly social nature of ants, scientists hope that this discovery may help shed light on the aging process in humans.
"I don't want to make any claims that the ant brains are just like human brains, because of course they're very different," Ysabel Giraldo, lead author on the paper, said in a press release. "But when we observe social insect behavior, there's something that is attractive and interesting because we think, well, maybe this parallels something about our own social organization."
"By looking at social insects, maybe we can learn something about how social interactions shape behavior or neurobiology that we can't learn in a solitary system," she added.
The team found that ants did not age in the way that they expected, and some behaviors, such as their ability to follow pheromone trails, actually improved with age. Furthermore, they became more active with age. Despite these unusual findings, the researchers still don't know how and why this is the case.
"We had a lot of conversations about what is going on. And the short answer is that there's a lot more research to do," Giraldo said, adding that it could stem from the fact that advanced social organization leads to an increase in the efficiency and resiliency of their brains or their low-oxygen living conditions.
"It's not one simple answer," she said.
Nevertheless, the findings reveal much about the behavioral development and senescence progression, or lack thereof, in the brains of social insects, and they may lead to significant contributions in the field by answering the smaller questions that could eventually propose solutions to the bigger ones.
The findings were published in the Jan. 6 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Academy B.
