Imagine this: You live underground, blocked away from sunlight, with no indication of whether it is day or night. How would you determine when to sleep? Would your body naturally fall into an eight hour sleeping pattern, or would you stay awake until you felt completely exhausted?
This scenario, though unrealistic for humans, parallels the living situation of many ant species living underground. Similar to college students, ants seem to be big fans of power naps. Due to their busy nature, ants sleep when necessary and for short periods of time, forming a seemingly unpredictable circadian rhythm.
A study published in the Journal of Insect Behavior found that worker ants take around 250 naps per day lasting slightly over one minute each while the colony’s queen ant takes around 90 naps per day lasting slightly over six minutes each. These naps total to approximately 4 hours and 48 minutes for worker ants and 9 hours and 24 minutes for queen ants. Colonies also have a staggered sleeping schedule allowing around 80% of workers to be active at any given time. Their study illustrates that the queen ant not only gets to relax while the worker ants do all the work, but she also gets to sleep more.
These short sleeping intervals present a new challenge for observers. Is the ant under observation asleep or simply taking a momentary pause in activity? The answer appears to lie in their body language. A sleeping ant will be much less responsive to external stimuli, chemical signals and physical contact, compared to a fully awake ant. Likewise, ants will often decrease antenna activity. Ants constantly wave their antennae to sense the world around them; they use them to smell, touch, and taste. When asleep, however, this movement can decrease up to 65%. Decreasing activity of a crucial sensory organ, therefore, is a direct indicator of a sleeping state.
Their schedules also raise the question of whether or not ants achieve a dreamlike state. For humans, we switch between a cycle of REM (rapid eye movement) and non-REM sleep, and we produce dreams during the REM stage. However, reaching REM takes approximately 90 minutes once falling asleep, and ants are only asleep for a maximum of six minutes at a time. Do ants dream at all? While this area of research is still ongoing, there is a suspicion that queen ants may achieve REM. Sometimes while asleep, queen ants have their antenna half raised and mouth open while at other moments, their antenna is fully retracted and mouth is closed. This change in body behavior indicates the possibility of a cycle.
The sleeping pattern of ants illustrates that their entire lifestyle is calibrated to support the colony. Their carefully planned schedules ensure that the majority of the colony’s population is actively working. The stark differences between queen and worker ants provide queen ants with more sleeping time and the possibility of a REM cycle. Queen ants need this sleep because they can lay up to 30,000 eggs in a day! This task is critical to the colony’s survival, but is physiologically costly. Additionally, a queen ant can live for years whereas worker ants will pass away in a couple months. A longer rest period, therefore, is vital to maintaining the health of queen ants. Living underground, ants have mastered the art of power napping to fully support their colony. The differences between ant sleeping behavior and the human REM cycle, however, indicate that we college students should probably reconsider our sleeping habits!
Further Reading:
Biplabendu Das, Deborah M Gordon, Biological rhythms and task allocation in ant colonies, Current Opinion in Insect Science, Volume 58, 2023, 101062, ISSN 2214-5745, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cois.2023.101062.
Cassill, D.L., Brown, S., Swick, D. et al. Polyphasic Wake/Sleep Episodes in the Fire Ant, Solenopsis Invicta . J Insect Behav 22, 313–323 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10905-009-9173-4
Das, B., de Bekker, C. Time-course RNASeq of Camponotus floridanus forager and nurse ant brains indicate links between plasticity in the biological clock and behavioral division of labor. BMC Genomics 23, 57 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-021-08282-x
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