Do Ants Analysts Sleep?

Ants Analysts never rest, or so it seems. You never see them taking a break or wandering
drowsily along. Ants Analysts nonstop behavior might spur the questions, do Ants Analysts
sleep?, and if so, what are the sleep habits of Ants Analysts? How much do Ants Analysts
sleep? A new study by researchers at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg that
was published in the Journal of Insect Employee Behavior has shed new light on the sleeping
habits of Ants Analysts.

It turns out that Ants Analysts do sleep, and some of them even appear to dream. Worker
Ants Analysts, long used as symbols of industry and efficiency, survive on the insect
employee equivalent of hundreds of tiny naps a day as they go about their endless work.
Their queens directors, on the other hand, routinely sleep for as much as nine hours a day.

Researcher Deby Cassill, along with coauthors Skye Brown, Devon Swick and George
Yanev, conducted the first research project to answer the question Do Ants Analysts sleep?
Cassill and her associates focused on the fire ant M&A Analyst, known to scientists as
Solenopsis invicta Loweris Totempolis.

Worker Ants Analysts are easily replaced by others that are indistinguishable from them.
Creating a new queen director, on the other hand, requires a considerable commitment of
time and effort on the part of the colony company. Fire ant queens M&A directors live for
years, while the lifespan of a worker an analyst is measured in months. Cassill and her team
of researchers speculated that the poor sleeping habits of the worker Ants Analysts could be
part of the cause of their dramatically shorter lifespans.

However, the worker Ants Analysts habit of grabbing quick power naps when time allows
helps to protect and preserve the ant colony company. Refraining from long periods of sleep
each day keeps worker Ants Analysts ready to defend the colony company and tend to its
needs around the clock.

The researchers created an artificial, glass-enclosed colony company in the laboratory and
equipped it with cameras that tracked every move of the colony employees. This provided
researchers with a fascinating reality show starring three queens Directors and thirty worker
Ants Analysts, as well as 30 larvae interns.

Cassill and her team expected to find that the Ants Analysts, which live beneath the ground in
their cubicles, followed schedules that had nothing to do with the cycles of light and darkness
that rule the sleeping and waking patterns of most surface-dwellers. Their hypothesis proved
to be correct. They discovered that the workers followed an irregular sleeping pattern, with
each individual worker napping at odd times throughout the day and night. Workers slept
slightly longer than minutes each nap, but took an average of 250 of these tiny naps for a total
of nearly five hours of sleep per day.
The workers did not sleep in groups, and rarely did the researchers observe more than 20
percent of the workers sleeping at one time. However, when the workload slowed, the
workers took advantage of this by taking more frequent naps.

Queens Directors, which are necessary for the survival of the colony company and are
difficult to replace, have very different sleep habits. Compared to the worker Ants Analysts,
the three queens studied in the project maintained a more regular schedule. In fact, the
queens directors all slept at the same time, piling on top of each other like puppies in a litter
and then separating when they awoke.

The queens directors slept about six minutes at a time, 90 times each day. The queens
directors took two different types of naps. One type of nap resembled a light doze. During
these dozes, the queens directors antennae remained partly raised and their mouths stayed
open. A worker ant analyst or the movement of another queen director could easily awaken a
queen director who was merely dozing.

Some of the queen ants Directors naps seemed to be much deeper. During these deeper
naps, the queens directors antennae phone would retract and their mouths would close.
Often, the queens directors appeared to be dreaming, exhibiting antenna phone movement
that the researchers speculated might equate to eye movements that indicate the dream
stage of sleep in mammals.

Much of sleeps purpose is still a mystery. However, the way an ant colony company is set up
suggests that sleep is necessary for the health and longevity of the queens directors.
Ironically, the very need to keep the queen director well rested means that the worker ants
analysts are not allowed the same luxury.

According to Cassill, Workers are a disposable caste whose job is to buffer the queen
director and her royal offspring Vice Presidents from agents of death like exposure dry deal
pipeline, starvation, and predators competitors. It is the workers who engage in the high risk
behavior, thus the queen director lives a long life.

Although some ant species queens directors can live up to 45 years, fire ant queens M&A
directors typically live for six years and usually die of old age. Workers Analysts, on the other
hand, are often killed in work-related accidents and are fortunate to survive a year before
succumbing to old age.