What turns an ant into a soldier or a forager? It may be all in their heads

Most worker carpenter ants have one of two fates: They either become foragers who look for food or soldiers who defend the nest. Levels of key hormones influence which role they crawl into. Now, a new study shows the ants’ blood-brain barrier plays a crucial role in this decision, regulating how much of one critical hormone seeps into developing ants’ brains by actively breaking it down. The findings, published last week in Cell , suggest the blood-brain barrier may play a previously unappreciated role in influencing social behavior in animals , including mammals, the authors argue. “[The study] uncovers an elegant mechanism of how social behavior can be regulated,” says Daniel Kronauer, an evolutionary biologist at Rockefeller University who was not involved with the study. Hormones dictate a variety of behaviors in many insects, particularly the jobs they perform within a colony. One hormone shown to be critical to development and vocational destiny in many species, known as juvenile hormone, is tightly regulated by enzymes that break it down if it is expressed at the wrong time during development. In ants, previous research has shown that higher levels of juvenile hormone promote foraging behavior. Scientists have typically observed these enzymes circulating through ants’ hemolymph (the ant equivalent of blood). Molecular biologist Shelley Berger at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) found a clue to her own vocatio...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news