You've probably heard about poop pills, the
latest way for humans to get benevolent bacteria into their guts. But it seems
that a group of ants may have been the original poop pill pioneers—46 million
years ago.
A new collaborative study, published
in Nature Communications, determined that turtle ants (Cephalotes) are able to supplement their low-nitrogen diets
by passing helpful
bacteria from
older ants to younger ones through anal secretions. Once this is done, the
now-internalized microbes (tiny bacteria) naturally produce the nitrogen
necessary for turtle ants to survive.
"Turtle ants eat a lot of food that is
hard to digest and contains few essential nutrients in accessible form,"
said Jacob Russell, PhD, an associate professor in Drexel University's College
of Arts and Sciences and the paper's senior author. "The fact that they
can subsist on such diets and have moved away from aggressively competing for
more optimal food resources with other ants is almost certainly a function of
their investment in symbioses with gut bacteria."
Carried out by researchers at Drexel, the
University of California San Diego, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard
University, The Rockefeller University, Calvin College, and the Field Museum of
Natural History, this multi-institution, international study was spearheaded by
Yi Hu, PhD, while finishing a postdoc at Drexel, and Jon Sanders, PhD, a
postdoc at UC San Diego.
The study was inspired by work Russell did
with Carrie Moreau, PhD, and Naomi Pierce, PhD, in Pierce's lab more than a
decade ago when they discovered that many ants with low-quality diets harbored
specialized bacterial symbionts - likely to supplement their diets.
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