“Ants reduce each worker’s investment in one of the most nutritionally valuable tissues for the benefit of the group,” Mattei explains. “They are shifting from self-investment to a distributed workforce.”
Collective power
The researchers believe the pattern they observed in the ants reflects a more global trend in the evolution of societal complexity. The transition from solitary life to complex societies reflects the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms.
In a single-celled organism, the cell must be a “jack of all trades,” performing all the functions necessary for survival. However, in a multicellular animal, individual cells often become simpler and more specialized, relying on collective cells for protection and resources.
“It’s a pattern that reflects the evolution of multicellularity, where cooperative units can be individually simpler than a single cell, but collectively they are capable of much greater complexity,” Mattei says. However, the question of whether underinvestment in individuals to strengthen the group makes sense for creatures other than ants remains open, and is most likely less about the economics of feeding and more about sex.
Consumer servants
The study focused on ants that already have a division of reproductive labor, where workers do not reproduce. This social structure is probably the basic condition for the cheap worker strategy. For the team, this is why similar evolutionary patterns have not been found, at least not yet, in more complex social creatures like wolves, which live in packs, or humans with their amazingly complex societies. Wolves and humans are both social, but maintain a high degree of individual self-interest regarding reproduction. Worker ants can be made 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 wants to take a closer look at ants. Economou, Mattei and their colleagues seek to expand their analysis to include other ant tissues, such as the nervous system and muscles, to see if individuals’ underpricing extends beyond the exoskeleton. They are also looking at ant genomes to find out what genetic innovations allowed the shift from quality to quantity. “We still need a lot of work to understand ant evolution,” says Mattei.
Advancement of science. 2025. Digital ID: 10.1126/sciadv.adx8068