insects – Quanta Magazine

How Is Flocking Like Computing?

Steven Strogatz — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Birds flock. Locusts swarm. Fish school. Within assemblies of organisms that seem as though they could get chaotic, order somehow emerges. The collective behaviors of animals differ in their details from one species to another, but they largely adhere to principles of collective motion that physicists have worked out over centuries. Now, using technologies that only recently became available...

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A Multitalented Scientist Seeks the Origins of Multicellularity

Claudia Dreifus — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 15:16:55 +0000

In Cassandra Extavour’s office at Harvard University hangs a placard with a painted rainbow flag and a friendly invitation. “You are welcome here,” it reads. “I have it up because I think it’s important to let people see your identities, especially when those identities are not well represented,” explained Extavour, an evolutionary geneticist who in 2014 became the first Black woman to win tenure...

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Why Insect Memories May Not Survive Metamorphosis

Yasemin Saplakoglu — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 13:38:54 +0000

On warm summer nights, green lacewings flutter around bright lanterns in backyards and at campsites. The insects, with their veil-like wings, are easily distracted from their natural preoccupation with sipping on flower nectar, avoiding predatory bats and reproducing. Small clutches of the eggs they lay hang from long stalks on the underside of leaves and sway like fairy lights in the wind.

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A Mutation Turned Ants Into Parasites in One Generation

Viviane Callier — Mon, 08 May 2023 14:49:21 +0000

When the researcher Daniel Kronauer was still a postdoc in 2008, he traveled to Okinawa, Japan, for wild specimens of clonal raider ants (the species Ooceraea biroi). In the first colony he collected, he noticed two ants with a strange appearance. They were small like workers, but they also sported small wing buds, which was striking because usually only ant queens develop wings.

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Ants Live 10 Times Longer by Altering Their Insulin Responses

Viviane Callier — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 16:46:31 +0000

Animals that produce many offspring tend to have short lives, while less prolific species tend to live longer. Cockroaches lay hundreds of eggs while living less than a year. Mice have dozens of babies during their year or two of life. Humpback whales produce only one calf every two or three years and live for decades. The rule of thumb seems to reflect evolutionary strategies that channel...

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