Ants Are a Model of Complex Societies, Says Biology's Timothy Linksvayer
Ant societies have distinct castes, fine-tuned strategies to avoid disease outbreaks, and dedicated workers that procure food and rear young—features that have arisen over 100 million years of evolution, says Assistant Professor of Biology Timothy Linksvayer. With a new Faculty Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation, Linksvayer is expanding his research into how genetics and behavior allow complex societies, like those of the pharaoh ants in his lab, to survive and thrive. What he finds may shed light on the mechanisms that other organisms, humans included, have evolved to live in large, orderly social groups.
“Humans are highly social, but we’ve only been living in large groups for thousands of years,” Linksvayer says. “Ants have been highly social for over a hundred million years. That’s what makes ants such an interesting model system.”
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