Living at Home

Everybody knows that natural selection explains why their can be so many species of one animal all around the world, it also explains why evolution took place but scientist are having trouble explaining is how this relates to insects? Scientists want to know why in some colonies of insects there are insects that can not reproduce but work just for the colony. Barbara Thorne, a scientist at the University of Maryland, believes that insects like termites stay home because it proves to be a lot safer then to run off and start a colony somewhere else plus they know that their parents will be killed by neighboring termites so it will inherit their living space. If this serves to be true then it goes against the evolution of sterility. Thorne and some of her other colleagues put three different family termites in the same area and like suspected, they fought each other often leading to the deaths of the kings and queens. To take their spots “juniors” fill in. These juniors were once sterile but then turn out to be the leading producers. The explanation to this is that pheromones given off by the king a queen leaves every other termite sterile but when they die that pheromone dies off. Since the colonies tend to be small, the chances of a worker being active are pretty high because termites tend to colonize the same tree. So in turn the workers stay in the colony because they know they will probably have a chance to become queen.
The study of these termites can be directly related to biology because it is dealing with evolution, natural selection, and all related topics to life which is all parts of biology. A background to biology will help any scientist study these termites and how they live. A biologist will know what to look for when you talk about reproduction and pheromones but if not a biologist then you won’t know what you are looking at.
Further studies on these termites would be extremely helpful to biological world. It would help to solve some questions that have no discovered answer. No one knows exactly why these termites stay in their own colony when they have a chance to reproduce on their own somewhere else. Barbara suspects that she knows why they stay but she still has not finalized her work and so she can’t yet confirm that the termites stay because it is more logical for them to stay and wait till their parents die when they can start a colony by themselves. Even if she does solve this problem she has to observe why other insects like ants stay just as workers instead of leaving and colonizing by themselves. Insects are in deed a mysterious bunch as our studies on them continue more and more information is being discovered.


Links:
http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=116316&org=NSF