You can lie down completely, don't have to work, and have no worries about food and clothing. Who is enjoying life for you?

Getting rid of work completely, lying down every day and not having to worry about food and clothing , this may be the common dream of workers all over the world.

Many people cannot have this kind of life, but some ants have already enjoyed it - as worker ants, they can lie in the nest all day without working, and still be fed and cared for by their companions . Not only that, lying completely flat also gives them a lifespan three times longer, and they can even stay young forever .

And the reason ants can live such a wonderful life is actually thanks to a parasite.

The wage earner turned into a waste

The protagonist of this story is a kind of ant (Temnothorax nylanderi). They are only 2 mm in size and live in the forests of Europe. They build nests in the cracks of tree bark or in the empty shells of acorns. Each ant nest has a queen ant and hundreds of worker ants.

Temnothorax nylanderi, worker ants and larvae | Matt Hamer

Worker ants are destined to be wage earners . They have to do housework in the ant nest since their "teenagers" and go out to find food when they grow up. Their busy life is very short and they usually die before the second year .

However, infection by a parasitic worm can completely change the fate of some ants.

The parasite is a microscopic tapeworm (Anomotaenia brevis), whose eggs are sometimes mixed in with food and eaten by ant larvae. The hatched parasites pass through the intestines and grow in the ant's abdomen, taking control of the host ant's body and behavior.

The larval stage of a tapeworm found inside an ant | Susanne Foitzik

In terms of appearance and metabolic characteristics, the infected ants seem to be frozen in a state of "youth", with their bodies remaining pale yellow with a lack of pigmentation for a long time. The parasites also give them an astonishing longevity: compared with their uninfected counterparts, their lifespan is extended by at least three times, and some individuals can even live for seven years.

Infected ants have a light yellow colour and can be easily distinguished from healthy worker ants | Susanne Foitzik / Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Not only that, these long-lived infected people also completely gave up work and lived a life of abandonment. Even when they have grown up, they are unwilling to leave the nest, and their food and daily life are completely taken care of by other uninfected workers.

What is even more incredible is that the other worker ants have no complaints about this, but work twice as hard . Under the control of the parasite, the infected ants emit chemical messengers that attract the attention of their companions, so other workers will willingly take care of them, even more attentively than taking care of the queen ant.

What do parasites want?

In our impression, parasitic infections should harm the host and even kill them. However, ants infected with tapeworms have no worries about food and drink, live a very long life, and seem to get all the benefits. Why is this?

The parasites treat ants so well in order to increase their chances of successful reproduction. Ants are only temporary intermediate hosts for the parasites, and their final hosts are two woodpeckers that prey on ants. Only when the tapeworms enter the intestines of birds can they truly mature and produce the next generation - therefore, they must allow the infected ants to be successfully eaten by the birds .

The Great Spotted Woodpecker (Dendrocopos major), one of the final hosts of the tapeworm | Hans Rentsch

Infected ants no longer forage for food, but stay quietly in their nests. Not only do they live longer, but they also lose their sense of danger, and they still don't know to escape even when researchers pry open their nests. These abandoned house characteristics can increase the probability of ants being eaten by woodpeckers, and the reproduction of parasites is therefore guaranteed. Eventually, mature parasites lay eggs in the intestines of birds, and the eggs continue to spread with bird droppings.

Although the infected ants seem to be happy, the parasites still harm the interests of the entire ant colony. Studies have found that in ant nests with infected ants, other uninfected worker ants are more burdened, and overwork will further shorten their already short lifespan .

An infected ant may contain up to 70 parasite larvae | Sara Beros

What is the secret to extra longevity?

There have been a few previous examples of parasites extending their hosts’ lifespans, but in those cases the extent of the increase was small, and none was as great as the effect the tapeworms had on the ants .

The infected ants are so long-lived that this amazing change can hardly be explained by their comfortable lives alone. Scientists believe that the parasite must have a more profound impact on the ants' physiological activities .

Temnothorax nylanderi | Herman/Wikimedia

A research team from the University of Mainz in Germany is exploring the mechanism behind this mysterious phenomenon. They compared the hemolymph of infected and uninfected ants, trying to find the chemical molecules that extend the lifespan of ants.

Preliminary research has found that the parasite releases up to 263 different proteins into the bodies of ants , about half of which are currently unknown to humans. Among them, some antioxidant components, including superoxide dismutase, may be related to the extension of ants' lifespan - but it is still difficult to prove this.

At present, relevant research is still ongoing, and humans are still a long way from fully uncovering the secrets of longevity ants. Of course, given that the physiological characteristics of ants are very different from those of humans, these discoveries can probably only satisfy curiosity and cannot become a panacea for extending human life .

References

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/05/ant-tapeworm/618919/

[2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.202118

[3] https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/674056

[4] https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bugbitten/2021/06/11/tapeworms-are-the-elixir-of-life-for-ants/

[5] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.23.521666v2

Author: Window Knocking Rain

Editor: Mai Mai

This article comes from GuokrNature (ID: GuokrNature)

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