February 3, 2016 by Barbara Moran
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P. dentata minor workers caring for larvae. Scientists found, surprisingly, that older workers did the job as well as young ones: “Type A personalities with no burnout!” says biologist James Traniello.
It's a
poignant fact of life: no matter how much we exercise, or how many wheatgrass
smoothies we slurp, our bodies still age. As the years pass, skin wrinkles,
eyesight falters, hearing fades. It's called senescence—the natural course of
aging. All animals succumb, except a rare and lucky few: the rougheye rockfish,
for instance, can live more than 200 years with negligible signs of aging;
ocean quahogs more than 500 years before dying from disease, accident, or
predation. Such rare, ageless animals are a scientific curiosity, perhaps
holding clues to how and why we humans age. And now, scientists at Boston
University have added another critter to the list of forever young: minor workers
of the ant Pheidole dentata.
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A new
study, published on January 6, 2016, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society
B, reports that P. dentata minor workers, which live up to 140 days in the
laboratory, show no signs of age-related decline before they die. None. Since ants are a social species, this new
discovery may hold meaning for the social animal we care most about: humans.
"I
don't want to make any claims that the ant brains are just like human brains,
because of course they're very different," says Ysabel Giraldo (GRS'14), a
postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology and lead author
on the paper. "But when we observe social insect behavior, there's
something that is attractive and interesting because we think, well, maybe this
parallels something about our own social organization." Giraldo earned a
PhD in biology from BU in 2014, and her thesis research—funded by the National
Institute on
Aging and
the National Science Foundation and winner of the prestigious Belamarich Award
for best biology dissertation—formed the basis for the new Royal Society paper.
"By looking at social insects, maybe we can learn something about how
social interactions shape behavior or neurobiology that we can't learn in a
solitary system," she says.
The idea
of studying how ants age began as a conversation between Giraldo and biology
professor James Traniello, co-lead author on the Royal Society paper and
Giraldo's thesis advisor, about the work of Robert Friedlander, a physician at
Brigham and Women's Hospital who studies the role of cell death in
neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. "We were
reading some literature on Alzheimer's and human aging and some of the
molecular mechanisms, looking at cell death in the brain," says Giraldo.
"And some of those conversations just got us wondering, 'What goes on in
ant brains?'"
She
decided to find out. Her plan: examine hundreds of P. dentata minor workers—the
"lab rat" of Traniello's lab—and look for similar phenomena that
occur in humans as we age: more cell death
in certain areas of the brain, lower levels of certain important
neurotransmitters, like dopamine and serotonin, and poorer performance on daily
tasks. Worker ants, of course, have different daily tasks than most of us.
Their jobs include caring for larvae, following pheromone trails to
cooperatively collect food, and scavenging dead insects. Measuring the ants'
performance took persistence, patience, and ingenuity. To see how well worker
ants followed a pheromone trail, for instance, researchers laid down an
artificial chemical trail and filmed the ants following it, noting how many times
they strayed more than one centimeter off course. It took Giraldo and her
colleagues about two years to gather the data. When she analyzed it, she and
Traniello were astonished at the results.
"We
knew that workers start out in life not being terribly good at things, but then
they acquire behavior and expand their repertoires," says Traniello.
"So we expected that there would be a normal curve for these kinds of
functions—they'd improve, they'd peak, and then decline. It would be like us
humans: our hearing starts to fade, our vision starts to fade, motor
coordination starts to fade, memory starts to fade—this is a great portrayal of
life, isn't it?—and then eventually we die. So we thought we'd see the same
kind of things going on in ants, but we didn't."
In fact,
the ants didn't age in any way that the scientists measured, and some of their
behaviors, like the ability to follow pheromone trails, actually improved. The
ants also became more active as they aged, a model for all us couch potatoes
who slump ever further into the cushions with every passing year.
The big
questions are, how? And why? And how can we be more like ants, at least in
their ability to dodge senescence? The answers, for now, are: we don't know, we
don't know and no, not yet. "We had a lot of conversations about what is
going on. And the short answer is that there's a lot more research to do,"
says Giraldo. Maybe advanced social
organization makes ant brains more efficient and resilient, says
Giraldo, or maybe it's because workers don't reproduce, or because they live in
a low-oxygen environment. "It's not one simple answer," she says.
The
scientists also aren't sure why the ageless ants actually die, other than
accident or predation. Nor are they yet able to answer the converse of that
question: is there something that could make the ants age? Coffee? Cigarettes?
Booze? Bad music? "Probably network television," offers Traniello.
Traniello
says the work tells us a lot about how behavioral development and senescence
proceed (or don't) in the brains of social insects. "Hopefully it will be
a significant contribution to the field," he says. But the research is
unlikely to produce an ant-based anti-aging serum, at least not anytime soon.
Rather, the work answers some small questions that may in time answer some
bigger questions.
"That's
the beauty of basic research," says Giraldo. "If we're willing to ask
some really basic scientific questions and broaden our perspective, we can get
some interesting insights into how neural systems work and maybe how aging
works."
Explore further:
More
information: Ysabel
Milton Giraldo et al. Lifespan behavioural and neural resilience in a social
insect, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2016). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2015.2603
http://phys.org/news/2016-02-ants-dont-alzheimer.html
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