Social Workers' Brains
The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has been the insect model organism top dog for decades. Being the first insect in space and integral to six Nobel prizes no less. While particularly familiar on BPoD as a human molecular genetics facsimile (check out the archive), the fruit fly's social behaviour is also well scrutinised. And to link behaviours to biology, extensive and detailed analyses of the fly's nervous system is available to reference (eg. HHMI Janelia's FlyLight project). Now such details are beginning to be gathered for a promising new neuroscience model organism – the clonal raider ant Ooceraea biroi. Here, a reference brain map has been generated from 40 imaged ant brains as a resource for marrying neurobiology to complex biological systems data
Read the published research article here
Video from work by Dominic D. Frank & Lindsey E. Lopes, and colleagues
Laboratory of Social Evolution and Behavior, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY, USA
Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Published in Current Biology, December 2025
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