Daniel Kronauer

In creating the first reference brain for the clonal raider ant, @danielkronauer.bsky.social has discovered a surprising individuality of brain characteristics that may yield new insights into the #neuroscience of individuality within animal societies.
🔗: www.rockefeller.edu/news/38754-a...

Clonal raider ants in Santa hats stickers

Clonal raider ants in Santa hats stickers

A telltale sign that it’s that time of the year again: festively dressed clonal raider ants are decorating the lab.

The final version of the clonal raider ant reference brain is now out OA in @currentbiology.bsky.social:

🐜 🧠 🐜 🧠 🐜 🧠 🐜 🧠 🐜 🧠 🐜

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New #research from Priya Rajasethupathy shows that long-term memory is formed by a cascade of molecular timers across brain regions.
“What we choose to remember is a continuously evolving process rather than a one-time flipping of a switch," she says.
🔗:https://bit.ly/44tpEUT

Photo of a spread from the book “The Ant Guests” by Komatsu, Shimada, and Maruyama. The images show rove beetles living inside army ant colonies.

Oof…Takashi Komatsu, Taku Shimada, and Munetoshi Maruyama just published a photography book on “The Ant Guests”. The photos are stunning! The book is organized by geographical region, and text is in both Japanese and English. Check it out (and order it) here:
roppon-ashi.jp/en/products/...

Age, caste, and social context shape ovarian morphology and transcriptomic profiles in red harvester ants npj Aging - Age, caste, and social context shape ovarian morphology and transcriptomic profiles in red harvester ants

Thrilled to share the first full paper from @AntLabUNAM! 🐜💥
Our paper examines how queen and worker harvester ants differ in ovarian morphology and gene expression, shedding light on the ovary as a hub for multiple physiological systems, not just reproduction. Check it out! rdcu.be/ePNP8

Summer Undergraduate Research Experience | HHMI The Cech Fellows Program is a paid, nine-week summer research experience empowering the next generation of scientific leaders.

Calling all rising juniors & seniors: Interested in biological or biomedical research? Applications for our ’26 Summer Undergraduate Research Experience Program are now open! Nine weeks, hands-on research, & mentorship from some of the nation’s top scientists — learn more: bit.ly/CechFellows

More ant talk, this time with rdzombak.bsky.social about how socially parasitic ant queens kill the resident queen to take over a colony. Or, in this case, how they manipulate the workers to kill their own mother. Cool new study by Taku “AntRoom” Shimada and colleagues in currentbiology.bsky.social.

Flora Lichtman and I chat about ants on Science Friday:

Btw, most of the photographs on display are by a certain alexwild.bsky.social

The Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT, has a new exhibit: Ants - Tiny Creatures, Big Lives. We went today, and here are some impressions. It’s not a massive exhibit, but well done and certainly worth checking out if you’re in the area. The exhibit runs through May 17.

Heterozygosity at a conserved candidate sex determination locus is associated with female development in the clonal raider ant (Ooceraea biroi) A complementary sex determination locus is conserved in ants and dates back to approximately 112 million years ago.

Final version now out in @elife.bsky.social: Heterozygosity at a conserved candidate sex determination locus is associated with female development in the clonal raider ant (Ooceraea biroi) doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

New article from the lab out today, in which we discuss how social behavior evolves at the molecular level. From parenting across the animal tree of life to caste systems in social insects, it’s all connected (and, therefore, slowly starts to make sense)…

Lab members are once again outdoing themselves at the annual @rockefeller.edu pumpkin carving contest. This year’s submission: an ant farm pumpkin with a carpenter ant colony digging to find a chamber of prey Drosophila.

Nice! 🔥

Such a cool story! I loved your talk at Janelia last week!

It’s mosquito o’clock apparently- here’s another cool paper about these unpleasant little blood suckers (with, it once again turns out, really interesting adaptations):

The male genitalia of an 𝘈𝘦𝘥𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘣𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘴 mosquito

What does mating look like when you only have a single shot at getting it right?

Very excited to share our work on an almost-invisible female control, rapidly evolving mating recognition systems, and species that break the rules and take over the world. IN MOSQUITOES>

Happy to chat about this. Could you please send me an email to start the conversation?

Absolutely! Sometimes things fall into place just right. 🐜 🧠 🐜

Yes, it really helps. We might write up a separate, detailed protocol on how we do the tissue prep and staining, but feel free to reach out in the meantime if you’re interested.

The project was spearheaded by Dominic Frank and Lindsey Lopes, with help from Rishika Mohanta, Isabelle Seckler, and Ivan Lacroix. Massive congratulations to the team! While this took a loooot of effort, the reference brain will facilitate lots of experiments and neuroscience studies down the road!

While constructing this reference, we discovered that clonal raider ant brains are highly variable. For example, while half the individuals have a left-tilted mushroom body medial lobe, the others have it tilted to the right. What that means for brain function and behavior we don’t know (yet).

New preprint from the lab: A reference brain for the clonal raider ant.
With this resource, which is based on 40 individual brains, you can register and compare all kinds of samples in a common space. It comes with lots of detailed protocols and a user-friendly GUI.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New findings solve “developmental biology’s most complicated problem”: how each olfactory neuron in the ant expresses exactly one out of hundreds of olfactory receptors.

By @vcallier.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/sensory-perc...

Ant olfactory neurons reveal new gene regulation mechanism The mechanism enables each olfactory neuron in the ant to express exactly one out of hundreds of olfactory receptors.

Don't miss this piece in @thetransmitter.bsky.social by @vcallier.bsky.social on @danielkronauer.bsky.social's latest work! His lab discovered that a protective screen of spurious transcriptional activity enables each olfactory neuron to express exactly one out of hundreds of olfactory receptors.

What could an ant's sense of smell teach us about social organization? - News Ants rely on smell to navigate nearly every aspect of their complex social lives. Thus, investigating their olfactory system, scientists believe, will reveal clues about the organization of ant society.  But olfaction is one of the least understood sens...

A study from the @danielkronauer.bsky.social lab has revealed a new form of olfaction gene regulation that may be broadly shared across insect species—opening up a new window into studying connections between genes and social behaviors. Read a Q&A with the scientists:

I’m petrified about today’s science news. Genetically modifying crabs to have cheetah genes? This could go sideways fast.

let me share a little story about a remarkable wasp that I encountered yesterday in our local deserts

I stumbled across her, and scrambled to get a few crappy photos .... but then realized that she had a burrow, perhaps a better photo op was possible ??

here she is at her burrow entrance.

A new study in ants from @danielkronauer.bsky.social reveals a previously unknown mechanism that ensures that each olfactory neuron expresses only one odorant receptor, with broad implications for the study of gene regulation. #RockefellerScience
https://bit.ly/4pwPFLY