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Why do worker ants die in two years while a queen ant can live for three decades? I know how ants may have ended up this way. Worker ants wear their bodies out. If they are still alive when the nest is in need of fewer ants they may harm rather than help their chance of gene transmission. Whereas a queen is a long term investment with her nest.
That is the remarkable thing though: the worker and queen may have identical genes. How then is their lifespan so different?
Worker ants don’t just have shorter lifespans because they take more risks and sleep less. My pampered pet ants still die after two three years tops — so there is something else going on.
@futurebird indeed, hormones. When in some species a worker becomes queen its lifespan increases dramatically, and shrinks back as dramatically when it reverts to worker, even in laboratory conditions.
"Ant queens can live for decades, while most workers survive only weeks to a few years. In most organisms, longevity is traded-off with reproduction, but in social insects, these two life-history traits are positively linked." – Negroni et al. 2021 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rstb.2019.0736
And also: "queen and worker lifespan diverge in closely related species representing the transition from solitary to social life and show that queen and worker lifespan are correlated if colony size is taken into account: with increasing colony size the lifespan differential between queen and worker increases" – Kramer snd Schainle 2013 https://academic.oup.com/biolinnean/article-abstract/109/3/710/2415673