Sentences with phrase «groups of worker ants»

But these previous studies looked at average levels of methylation within a sample of each insect type — taking, for instance, a group of worker ants, mixing their DNA together, and measuring the average amount of methylation among all their brains.

Not exact matches

Fighting ants, giant solider termites, and foraging worker ants recently discovered in 100 - million - year - old amber provide direct evidence for advanced social behavior in ancient ants and termites — two groups that are immensely successful because of their ability to organize in hierarchies.

However, in other groups such as leaf - cutter ants, it is the workers that produce antimicrobials, so disease can only explain a few instances of soldier evolution.

That's a start, but it's still unknown which workers do the digging, whether they have this directional bias individually or as a group, or how the number of ants may influence nest size and shape.

The team, headed by OIST's Prof. Alexander Mikheyev of the Ecology and Evolution Unit and Dr. Claire Morandin, post-doctoral scholar at the University of Helsinki, collected queens and workers and sequenced the transcriptome — the full range of messenger RNA molecules expressed by an organism — of 16 species of ants to create a co-expression network of 36 sets of genes, that represent groups of similarly expressed genes.

They gave groups of 25 to 30 worker ants five to 10 larvae to rear, providing the workers with food that was either supplemented with the hormone or a solvent.