For a long time, scientists have wondered why some ants become queens and others remain as workers. Queens are bigger, have wings, and can lay eggs. Workers, on the other hand, are smaller, wingless, and cannot reproduce. Experts have always debated whether this difference is caused by genetics or the environment, like food and temperature.

Now, a new study from The Rockefeller University gives a better answer. The study was led by Dr. Daniel Kronauer and was published in the science journal PNAS. His team studied a special ant species called the clonal raider ant (Ooceraea biroi), which is useful for experiments because all ants can be made to have the same genes and grow in the same environment.

What did they find out?

The team learnt that an ant's body size is very important in deciding whether it becomes a queen or a worker, but size itself is influenced by both genes and environment.

The researchers gave the ants different amounts of food, kept them at different temperatures, and even changed the type of ants that cared for the baby ants. They saw that these environmental factors affected how big the ants grew. Small ants became workers. But if the ant grew large enough, it started to show queen-like features like wings, special eyes, and large ovaries.

However, genes played a bigger role than expected. Even when ants from different genetic families were raised the same way, they grew differently. Some genes made ants more likely to become queens even if they were small in size.

"Genes don’t just influence how big an ant grows," says Patrick Piekarski, co-author and postdoctoral researcher in Kronauer’s lab, "they also set the body size threshold at which queen features appear."

That means two ants that are the same size may have very different chances of becoming queens if they have different genes.

This study shows that in ant societies, genes don’t just help ants grow. They also decide what that growth means, whether the ant becomes a queen or not.

You might also be interested in: Indian users can now use UPI for international payments via PayPal’s new ‘World’ platform