SEX can make you go blind—if you’re an ant. Biologists in Germany have
found that the insects’ brains shrink when they abandon a life of celibacy.
When their queen dies, Harpegnathos worker ants can become
egg-layers. Wulfila Gronenberg and Jürgen Liebig of the University of
Würzburg have found that the animals lose around a quarter of their brain
volume when this happens, particularly in their optic lobes (
Naturwissenschaften, vol 86, p 343).
Workers rely on vision to forage, but egg-layers stay in dark nesting
chambers. The ants may save energy for egg-laying by abandoning parts of the
brain they no longer need, the researchers suggest.
