Inside the moist leaf litter of the Lenberg Forest near Mainz, Germany, tiny worker ants of the species Temnothorax nylanderi are living surprisingly long lives. While a typical worker ant usually lives a short, busy life of only one to two years, workers carrying a parasitic tapeworm called Anomotaenia brevis can live several times longer. Rather than dying young, their survival chances seem to match that of their queen, a royal ant that can live up to twenty years.Now, a detailed study published in the journal BMC Genomics reveals how this unusually long life actually works. Scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) discovered that tapeworms don’t just make ants sick or weak. Instead, it carefully changes the way the ant’s genes work, altering the body’s normal processes so that the worker’s physical body begins to function more like a long-lived queen ant.
Tapping into royal biology
To understand how parasites extend life, an international research team led by Professor Suzanne Foitzik of the Institute of Organismic and Molecular Evolution (IOME) at JGU brought forest ant colonies into the laboratory. They divided the ants into three test groups: healthy queens, healthy uninfected workers, and workers carrying tapeworm parasites.Scientists carefully removed two major parts from the ants: the brain and the fat body. In insects, the fat body is an important tissue in the abdomen that stores energy, manages digestion, handles stress, and protects the immune system, functioning like the human liver. Using advanced RNA sequencing, the researchers measured which genes were active in these tissues. They also looked at the tapeworm’s genetic data to track its activity and investigate whether it was using secret chemical tricks.The results showed clear differences in how the parasite affects its host. Rather than causing general harm, the infection changed the ant’s active genes in a very specific way.“Our genetic analysis shows that infection does not simply make the ants sick, but also alters their physiology in a highly targeted manner,” said Suzanne Foitzik. “At the molecular level, infected workers showed a profile that partially resembled that of the queen.”This change was strongest within obese bodies. Genes activated in infected workers closely match those in long-lived queens, particularly biological systems in charge of digestion, immune defense, stress resistance and aging.“The fat body findings show that the tapeworm enters and transduces the ant’s existing signaling and metabolic pathways,” Foitzik said.
calm mind and slow behavior
While the parasite alters the ant’s body to slow down aging, it takes an entirely different path inside the brain. In healthy nests, worker ants build, gather food, care for the young ants, and defend the colony. However, infected workers become very quiet, do little work and remain seated inside the nest for long periods of time.When researchers examined brain tissue, they found that infected workers didn’t look like the queens at all. Instead, many neuropeptides, which are signaling chemicals that regulate social actions, feeding, and energy levels, were turned off along with the cell parts that receive them.“The effect of infection is therefore tissue-specific,” explains Giulia Blasi, first author of the study and a doctoral researcher at IOME. “In the obese body, we see a shift toward a queen-like metabolic profile. In contrast, in the brain, many signaling pathways associated with behavior and activity are weakened.”
an indirect acquisition strategy
At first, scientists wondered whether the tapeworm was simply creating its own mimicking chemicals to trick the ant’s brain and body. Many parasites produce mimicking chemicals that look like their host’s own signals, which cause the host’s body to act as the parasite wishes.However, genetic testing on the tapeworm showed that its chemicals were not similar enough to ant chemicals to act as direct mimics.“The data suggest that the parasite affects the ant indirectly by interfering with the host’s own regulatory networks, which control metabolism, the immune system, aging and behavior,” Blasi said.This clever method fits into the tapeworm’s life plan. For Anomotaenia brevis, the worker ant is just a temporary home. The parasite cannot lay eggs inside the ant; Its entire life cycle may take place inside the stomach of its main host, the woodpecker.Making the host ant slow and lazy serves a real purpose in keeping it alive longer. An ant that remains inside the nest unmolested for years gives the tapeworm a safe, stable home. At the same time, when a woodpecker breaks into the nest in search of a snack, the slow-moving anteater easily makes a meal.
A clear view of how aging works
The research, funded by the German Research Foundation, was conducted by JGU researchers Suzanne Foitzik, Giulia Blasi and Catharina Schwalo with Hugo Darras of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.The findings provide scientists with a useful natural setup to study how aging is controlled at the genetic level. Since worker ants and queen ants are born with exactly the same genetic instructions, their vastly different lifespans depend entirely on which gene is turned on or off.“Queens and workers of social insects share the same genetic basis, but differ greatly in lifestyle and life span,” said Suzanne Foitzik. “The fact that infected workers show a partially queen-like molecular profile in the fat body suggests that the parasite taps into the ant’s existing biological programs.”The study was conducted by Giulia Blasi, Katarina Schwolo, Hugo Darras and Suzanne Foitzik from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. His research, titled Cestode infection is associated with transcriptional changes in neuropeptide signaling and species-specific aging pathways in a social insect, It investigates how parasite infections affect gene activity and aging pathways in social insects.