Do ants sleep? The answer is Yes ants do sleep but not like us.
Perhaps the most popular thing about ants is how industrious they are. What gives them all that energy?
We know that REM sleep and just plain old sleep is important to all living beings. So, unsurprisingly, ants do sleep but it’s very different from what it looks like in humans.
Most ants take tens or hundreds of naps for a few minutes every day. The frequency and duration of each nap depend on the individual species.
Research shows that worker ants have a cyclical schedule wherein they take turns sleeping and watching the colony.
Interestingly, sleep causes ants to lose muscle tone and reduces the sensitivity of their stimuli. Except, you don’t see complex brain activity related to these losses, unlike humans.
This all changes in the winter when they become very inactive and hibernate. Fascinated? Keep reading.
How Do Ants Sleep?
There are about 12,000 species of ants and whether they are active during the day or night changes depending on the species. Their sleep patterns also change accordingly.
It all depends on the type of ants from carpenter ants, sugar ants, ghost ants, fire ants, to black ants, sleep patterns can vary.
The Process of Sleep in Ants
For instance, queen ants are important for any colony. It’s tough to replace them and they ensure the colony’s survival. These ants, research says, have a regular sleep cycle.
They all sleep for about six minutes at a time, 90 times every day which amounts to over nine hours every day.
Some evidence shows that they dream as well, which causes rapid eye movements and makes their antennae vibrate.
Worker ants, on the other hand, have more irregular sleep patterns. They take about 250 one-minute naps during a 24-hour period, which is why they end up sleeping only for about 4 hours and 48 minutes.
Turns out worker ants would get more sleep if it was quieter during the day. That might explain why some think worker ants don’t dream.
The Behavior of Ants During Sleep
Funnily enough, it’s actually hard to tell when an ant is sleeping because there is no change in its posture, and ants apparently, don’t close their eyes either.
The only two ways to tell that an ant is sleeping is by first looking to see if their antennas are retracted. The second thing to notice is that they do not move at all when they are asleep.
If you’re trying to picture it, here’s another fun detail. Ants are a bit sluggish after they wake up.
Comparison of Sleep Patterns in Different Species of Ants
Speaking of sluggishness, in 1986, scientists looked at ants’ brain activity and determined that soldier, red and black ants manage to sleep beyond just naps compared to other species.
But what’s curious is that there was an increase in the brain function of soldier ants, which are wingless and sterile females, when they were sleeping as opposed to red and black ants which showed a reduction in brain activity as you would expect.
Significance of Ant Sleep
If you’re wondering how sleep impacts an ant colony, there are some interesting details here. It is the job of the worker ants to protect the colony and take care of the queen and her offspring. So, they can’t all take their naps at the same time, right?
Impact on the Colony’s Productivity
So, only about 20 percent of the worker ants in a colony nap at the same time. The other 80 percent are busy taking “serve and protect” quite seriously, which, if you think about it, is a pretty good strategy.
So, there is never a time when you will catch an ant colony off guard. But this rule changes when there’s less work. That’s when worker ants tend to take more naps.
That is more likely to happen in winter when ants hibernate. But when food is scarce, ants become inactive and enter a state called diapause which looks a lot like sleep but isn’t technically that.
Sleep and Memory
Sleep is also often connected to memory and ants have a good memory. Carpenter ants are good with the locations of sugary treats.
The Sahara Desert ant can remember its distance from its nest in a barren desert.
Redwood ants can’t remember much individually but the colony comes back to the same trees in Europe every year. So, there’s collective memory. Young ones can follow the trails laid by adult ants and carry on even after the older ant is dead.
But there doesn’t seem to be any scientific evidence that sleep cycles have anything to do with ants’ ability to learn or remember details required, for survival or otherwise.
Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Ants
The biggest impact of sleep (or the lack thereof) on ants is on their lifespan just like in humans. Scientist Deby Cassill demonstrated that better quality of sleep is why queen ants live longer than worker ants. The exact time period varies, but queen ants are known to live for many years, going up to 45 years.
Meanwhile, worker ants are disposable and only meant to protect the colony from predators, exposure, and starvation. Understandably, they need sleep as a form of physical rest. And they live for only 4 to 12 months and usually die in the line of duty or of old age.
Conclusion
Clearly, ants do sleep and their patterns are far more fascinating than ours. From queen ants to worker ants, they all have different sleep patterns. Most of them take power naps as often as they can and it has a significant impact on their average lifespan much like all living beings.
There seems to be a caste system among ants and thanks to that, queens sleep more peacefully and more often. Worker ants take hundreds of naps every day in cycles so that some of them are always awake.
Queen ants also don’t have much to worry about with an army guarding them, which is probably why they sleep at the same time and possibly dream as well. Meanwhile, worker ants would apparently take more naps during the day if their surroundings were quieter.
If you look at the big picture, doesn’t sound a whole lot different from us humans, does it?
