Haruna Fujioka, a second-year master's student at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo, and Masato Abe, a specially appointed researcher at the National Institute of Informatics, have researched worker ants with young and vulnerable children such as eggs and larvae. It was found that when they lived together, the worker ants lost their original activity rhythm and worked 2 hours a day, 24 days a week, without sleep.
Almost all living things on the earth, including humans, have an activity cycle of about 24 hours, which is adjusted day and night.Similarly, ants have been known to exhibit day and night active and inactive rhythms when they are alone.However, it was not well understood how much ants, who usually live in a family rather than alone, recognize the social environment such as family and work, and decide how to work and how to spend time.
Therefore, in the research, we focused on child-rearing, which is especially important in the family life of ants, and let the "eggs and larvae" that require careful care and the "pupa" that does not require much effort live together with the worker ants of Togeo Hariari to take care of them. We investigated how ant behavior changes depending on the growth stage of the pupa.
As a result, it was found that the worker ants were active alone in the daytime and decreased in activity at night, but when paired with eggs and larvae, they continued to be active at night and were always active 24 hours a day.On the other hand, when paired with pupae that have advanced to the growth stage, they showed activity only during the daytime, as when they were alone.This is because the pupae of the spiny pearl oysters are wrapped in cocoons and do not require care such as feeding or grooming (the behavior of licking and cleaning the body), and ants depend on the growth stage and care needs of the child to be raised. It is thought that it is changing the activity.
This study is a new and important study in that it shows that social insects can respond extremely flexibly to the growth stage of children.It is also known in humans, dolphins, orca, honeybees, etc. that parenting brings constant activity, but it is a property that is widely common to the social behavior of animals, from insects to mammals, to be attached to the rearing of immature individuals. The possibility was shown.
