NEW YORK - Researchers studying the social behavior of ants have found that a single gene underlies both the aggressive behavior of the ant colony’s soldiers and the food gathering behavior of its foraging caste, the New York Times reports.
The gene is active in soldier ants, particularly in five neurons in the front of their brain, where it generates large amounts of its product, a protein known as PKG. The exact amount of the protein in the ants’ brains is critical to their behavior.
Low levels of PKG predispose both castes of ant to foraging; high levels make the soldiers fight and the foraging caste less interested in food gathering, Christophe Lucas and Marla B. Sokolowski report in the current issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Source: New York Times
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