Harvester ant colonies differ in collective behavioural plasticity to regulate water loss.

Collective behavioural plasticity allows ant colonies to adjust to changing conditions. The red harvester ant (), a desert seed-eating species, regulates foraging activity in response to water stress. Foraging ants lose water to evaporation.

Biological rhythms and task allocation in ant colonies.

Task allocation in ant colonies, mediated by social interactions, regulates which individuals perform which task and when they are active, in response to the current situation. Many tasks are performed in a daily temporal pattern. An ant's biological clock depends on the patterns of gene expression that are regulated using a negative feedback loop which is synchronized to the earth's rotation by external cues.

Hijacking time: How Ophiocordyceps fungi could be using ant host clocks to manipulate behavior.

Ophiocordyceps fungi manipulate ant behaviour as a transmission strategy. Conspicuous changes in the daily timing of disease phenotypes suggest that Ophiocordyceps and other manipulators could be hijacking the host clock. We discuss the available data that support the notion that Ophiocordyceps fungi could be hijacking ant host clocks and consider how altering daily behavioural rhythms could benefit the fungal infection cycle.

Time-course RNASeq of Camponotus floridanus forager and nurse ant brains indicate links between plasticity in the biological clock and behavioral division of labor.

Background: Circadian clocks allow organisms to anticipate daily fluctuations in their environment by driving rhythms in physiology and behavior. Inter-organismal differences in daily rhythms, called chronotypes, exist and can shift with age. In ants, age, caste-related behavior and chronotype appear to be linked.

Genetic Underpinnings of Host Manipulation by as Revealed by Comparative Transcriptomics.

Ant-infecting fungi are globally distributed, host manipulating, specialist parasites that drive aberrant behaviors in infected ants, at a lethal cost to the host. An apparent increase in activity and wandering behaviors precedes a final summiting and biting behavior onto vegetation, which positions the manipulated ant in a site beneficial for fungal growth and transmission. We investigated the genetic underpinnings of host manipulation by: ( producing a high-quality hybrid assembly and annotation of the genome, () conducting laboratory infections coupled with RNAseq of and its host, , and () comparing these data to RNAseq data of and as a powerful method to identify gene expression patterns that suggest shared behavioral manipulation mechanisms across -ant species interactions.