While a mosquito bite is often no more than a temporary bother, in many parts of the world it can be scary. One mosquito species, Aedes aegypti, spreads the viruses that cause over 100,000,000 cases of dengue, yellow fever, Zika, and other diseases every year. Another, Anopheles gambiae, spreads the parasite that causes malaria. The World Health Organization estimates that malaria alone causes more than 400,000 deaths every year. Indeed, their capacity to transmit disease has earned mosquitoes the title of deadliest animal.
New research reveals how social isolation impacts behavior and lifespan in social species
Researchers used Camponotus fellah (carpenter ants) as a model species to perform behavioral tracking and ribonucleic acid-sequencing (RNA-seq) to study the transcriptome-level differences between socially isolated