How stealth organs make super soldier ants (Ep 91)

<p>What is eco-evo-devo? How can ants help us understand the evolution of development?</p> <p>There are 20 quadrillion ants in the world, and they come in lots of different shapes and sizes. We even see big differences <em>within</em> colonies, like ants in the genus <em>Pheidole</em> which have different castes: workers, soldiers, and, in some species, super soldiers. Super soldiers are the muscle-y brutes of the ant world that grow huge heads to defend the colony and attack large food items, like other insects. This variation is all due to <em>developmental plasticity</em> – the same ant genotype produces distinct phenotypes depending on the environment of their early lives.</p> <p>On this episode, we talk with<a href="https://www.rajakumarlab.com/" target="_blank"> <u>Rajee Rajakumar</u></a>, a professor at the<a href="https://www2.uottawa.ca/en" target="_blank"> <u>University of Ottawa</u></a>, who studies <em>Pheidole</em> ants to understand the interactions between their genes, their developmental environments, and their phenotypes. Rajee is also a HUGE ant fan! We talk with him about his 2018<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0613-1" target="_blank"> <u>paper in Nature</u></a> about the mysterious organs that control these differences in development, and amazingly, how these organs could be socially regulated via pheromones.</p> <p>Cover art: Keating Shahmehri</p>