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Ah, to be a queen bee… you get to sit back, watch everybody else work, and chow down on
royal jelly, a special goo full of rich protein, sweet sugar, and delicious fatty acids.
We’ve talked about it before on SciShow: this nutrient-dense food
is what turns a baby bee into a colony’s queen.
Scientists have known for a while that it’s important for royal development, and have
tried to figure out which ingredients make up the secret sauce.
But it turns out that part of what makes royal jelly so remarkable
is what isn’t inside it.
A team of Chinese researchers reported yesterday in the journal PLOS Genetics that there are
plant RNAs in the slop that the rest of bees get that are mostly missing in royal jelly.
These RNAs slow growth and prevent females from becoming fertile,
essentially dooming them to be workers.
It’s a curious case where plants, in a roundabout way,
end up changing an animal’s entire social structure...
Imagine if the potatoes we ate could somehow, like, pick our President!
It sounds ridiculous, but researchers have suspected that something in plants might be
involved because royal jelly comes from glands in the heads of nurse bees.
It’s an animal product.
On the other hand, worker bees dine on a simpler mix of pollen and honey called beebread,
which is more plant-based.
Plants have short strips of RNA, or ribonucleic acid, called microRNAs,
which can help regulate which genes get expressed inside them.
To be clear, we animals have microRNAs inside us too.
And among other things, these short sequences can match up to bigger RNA molecules that
are used to make proteins, and bind to them, triggering a degradation process.
But the weird thing is: these tiny RNAs from plants can survive digestion
and pass into animal cells through the food they eat.
So some microRNAs from pollen can influence which proteins bees make.
Which is weird.
When this team of scientists checked the two foods for plant RNAs,
they found far more in beebread than in royal jelly.
And when they fed larvae with lab-made food laced with the plant RNAs in beebread,
the insects weighed less, were shorter, and had smaller ovaries.
Basically, they looked more like worker bees.
To find out how the RNAs might be working, the scientists looked to see what the targets
were, and found many related to honeybee development.
Even in fruit flies, which are not social insects and don’t have a caste system, this
lab-made diet made the insects lighter, shorter, and less fertile.
The biologists don’t think that plant microRNA in beebread is the only reason why
just a few females get the crown.
After all, there’s a lot happening with royal jelly.
But part of the secret is that royal jelly doesn’t have
these development-delaying molecules.
It’s stripped of them when it’s being made, which means that food prep is
just as important for bees as it is for you and me.
Now, bees are not the only insects to make headlines this week.
Entomologists at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and the University
of Illinois detailed an entirely new way that ants capture prey with their jaws.
The work, which was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology,
focused on a group known as trap-jaw ants.
These ants all have jaws that operate like spring-loaded catapults to catch food, pinning
victims between their mandibles in a kind of sideways alligator snap.
But each one has a slightly different set-up, using different body parts as the latches,
and springs, and triggers.
In fact, trap-jaw ants aren’t even really that closely related to each other.
They’re a motley crew, independently evolving similar mouthparts
at least four times over the eons.
In this case, researchers investigated two members of the Myrmoteras genus, which have
longer and spikier mandibles than other trap-jaw ants.
They also open them much wider, a kind of frightening 280 degrees.
The team knew almost nothing about these species going in, so they collected a couple of colonies
from Malaysia, and brought them back to the lab to film them with high speed cameras.
The group found that the ants can snap their jaws shut in about a half a millisecond, a
tiny fraction of the blink of an eye, and with about 100 times more power than what
the ants would be able to muster with muscles alone.
The scientists think the trick is a lobe at the back of the head that compresses
and serves as a spring to power the jaws.
CT scans of the ants revealed that inside the head,
a big, slow muscle contracts to load the spring.
Then, a smaller but extremely fast muscle lets everything rip.
Together, these two muscles take up a little over a quarter of their head --
twice as much as the brain and eyes combined!
As impressive as these ants are, though, they’re much slower than other trap-jaw ants,
maybe even 10 times slower.
But they just need to be fast enough to munch on these
quick, jumpy insect-like creatures called springtails.
So really, there isn’t any need to be faster.
It’s just another unique, incredible way insects catch their prey.
Despite centuries of research, there’s a ton we still don’t know about the millions
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