Before ants began caring for their young, the brain circuits were helping them find food

Scientists studying ants have found that the brain circuits that caregiving behaviour may have evolved from far older circuits that originally controlled hunger. The research, carried out on clonal raider ants at Rockefeller University and published in the journal Nature, shows that two chemical signals in the ant brain, known as neuropeptide F and allatostatin A, control whether an individual ant acts as a caregiver to larvae or leaves the nest to forage for food. Since ant colonies naturally shift young workers from caregiving duties to foraging as they age, the findings offer a rare window into how nurturing behaviour may have first emerged from ancient systems built simply to regulate feeding.How researchers tested ant brain chemistry and caregivingAccording to Rockefeller University, the team built a behavioural system that placed individual ants with individual larvae, allowing them to automatically track hundreds of caregiving interactions at once. Researchers then identified and produced many of the chemical signalling molecules found in ant brains and tested each one to see how it affected caregiving behaviour.The team chose clonal raider ants for a specific reason. Every ...