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A team of researchers has found that a western European ant lives much longer if it is infected with tapeworms. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the group describes their study of the ants and tapeworms and what they discovered about both.
Ant colonies are typically made up of a single queen and a bunch of workers. The queen is attended to by nurses who also tend to the eggs she lays. Nurses are young ants that eventually grow older and graduate to become worker ants. In this new effort, the researchers found a kind of ant colony where things are a little different. The ants (Temnothorax nylanderi) are native to western Europe, as is Anomotaenia brevis, a species of very tiny tapeworm—they infest the guts of T. nylanderi. And when they do, they unleash chemicals that impact the behavior of their host.
The study by the researchers was carried out over a three-year period—long enough to see that one or more of the chemicals that the tapeworms release leads to longer lifespans for the hosts. They also found that those ants that were infected stopped doing their jobs. Instead, they simply hung out doing nothing but eating food brought to them by non-infected ants. They also retained their youthful attributes—the researchers noted that they had trouble distinguishing older infected ants from the young nurse ants.
The researchers found that after three years, all of the workers present at the start of their study were dead, while roughly half of those infected with tapeworms were still alive. The researchers also noted that the infected ants never left the nest, which they suggest was by design—the chemicals released into their guts by the tapeworms made them lazy and uninterested in doing much of anything—this made it easier for birds who crack open the nest to catch and eat them. It is all part of the tapeworm's lifecycle—they need the birds to eat the ants to reach maturity. Once they do, they lay eggs that stick to the feet of worker ants who bring them back to an ant nest.
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