Leafcutter ants live in highly organized colonies where every ant has a job, and now researchers can flip those jobs like a switch. By manipulating just two neuropeptides, scientists can turn ...

In eusocial superorganisms like leafcutter ant colonies, labor is divvied up according to body shape and size, but University ...

Leafcutter ant colonies, celebrated for their rigid division of labour, have yielded a startling secret: their roles can be ...

From tiny nuisances to powerful predators, ants are some of the most fascinating, diverse and sometimes deadliest insects on ...

This is why they use toilet chambers. Whether they isolate it in a toilet chamber or kick it to the curb, ants don’t keep their waste around. But some ants find a use for that stuff. One such species ...

Animals were once considered mindless—incapable of thoughts or feelings. These views dominated common thought for millennia, ...

Ants are some of the world’s most prolific and misunderstood insects. While North America alone is home to around 1,000 ...

Within Atta cephalotes, or leafcutter ants, every role is pre-written in morphology, from curves of the mandible (jaws) to body size, scripting a precise division of labor.