Queen Ants Dozily Dream, While Worker Ants Power Nap (via BBC Earth News)
Queen fire ants fall into relatively long, deep sleeps and kip for an average of nine hours every day. By contrast, workers sleep just half as much and get to rest by taking hundreds of short power naps.
This division of rest may help explain why queens live for years, while worker ants typically only live for months. It also ensures that enough worker ants are awake at any one time to protect and serve the colony.
As for the workers:
Because fire ants generally live underground, the researchers expected that their sleep patterns would not be determined by light and dark cycles. And that is what they found. Workers fell asleep at irregular intervals, and not at the same time. But the sheer number of incredibly short naps they took was striking. On average, a single worker ant would take 250 naps each day, with each one lasting just over a minute. That equates to 4 hours and 48 minutes of sleep a day. That also meant that 80 per cent of the workforce was awake and active at any one time.
And the queens…
The queens fell asleep at far more regular intervals than their subjects. In fact, the queens even synchronised their naps, with all three queens dozing together….On average, each queen would fall asleep 90 times a day, sleeping for just over 6 minutes at a time. That equates to over nine hours of sleep each day.
Queens also slept in two distinct ways.
Sometime they would just doze, with their antennae half raised and their mouths agape. When dozing, the queens could be easily roused by one another or by their workforce. But often the queens would fall into much deeper sleep, with their antennae retracted and mouths closed.
Intriguingly, Cassill’s team gathered evidence suggesting that the queen ants dream when sleeping deeply. Frequently, the queens would quiver their folded antennae when sleeping deeply. This “rapid antennal movement (RAM) might be an analog to the rapid eye movement in vertebrates,” the researchers write in the Journal of Insect Behavior.
