Biology is full of trade-offs, and one of the most famous is whether success depends on quality or quantity—creating stronger individuals or producing more of them.
Research published in Achievements of science shows how this trade-off manifested itself in ants. Comparing hundreds of species, the researchers found that ants with particularly large colonies tend to create workers with thinner exoskeletons, investing less in personal protection to support many more workers overall. The results suggest that as societies become more complex, evolutionary pressures may shift from individual resilience to systems that thrive on numbers and coordination.
“In biology, the question arises of what happens to individuals as the societies in which they find themselves become more complex. For example, individuals themselves may become simpler because tasks that would have to be performed by a single organism can be performed by a collective,” senior author Evan Economo said in the paper. press release.
How ant colonies trade strength for numbers
Ant colonies range from a few dozen people to societies with millions of workers. How colonies As it grows, the kinds of jobs that might overwhelm a single insect—foraging, nest defense, and disease control—can be distributed among many bodies.
To see how this shift might change the shape of humans, the researchers focused on the cuticle, the hardened outer layer of the exoskeleton. It helps protect the ants from predators, dehydration and infection, and supports movement, but it is also nutritionally expensive to create as it requires nitrogen and minerals, which may not be enough.
Measuring the cost of ant control
Using high-resolution 3D X-ray images, the team measured the cuticle and body volumes of more than 500 ant species. The volume of the cuticle varied, in some species it was only 6 percent of the total body volume; in others – up to 35 percent.
When the researchers correlated these measurements with colony size and evolutionary history, they found that species that invest less in the cuticle tend to support much larger colonies. Rather than maximizing the protection of each worker, these ants appear to rely more on collective strategies to protect weaker individual armor.
“Ants are reducing their per-worker investment in one of their most expensive fabrics for the benefit of the team,” said study lead author Arthur Matt. “They move from self-investment to a distributed workforce, leading to more complex societies. This model reflects the evolution of multicellularity, where cooperative units may be individually simpler than a single cell, but collectively capable of much greater complexity.”
Read more: Bumblebees and ants fight in brutal nectar wars, resulting in death and food shortages
When numbers beat power
Thinner armor sounds risky, but in a large colony the risk is spread out. Losses can be compensated, dangerous tasks can be divided, and protection can come from coordination rather than rigidity.
What colonyThe level of persistence may help explain another pattern: ants with lower investment per worker also tended to exhibit higher rates of diversification—meaning they split into new species more often over the course of evolutionary time. One hypothesis is that colonies with lower nutritional requirements may expand into nutrient-limited habitats, opening up new ecological opportunities that accelerate diversification.
What Ant Colonies Reveal About Tradeoffs Everywhere
The pattern the researchers discovered is not limited to insects. Similar trade-offs between quality and quantity appear throughout human history, from military organization to everyday decisions—cases where scale and coordination can matter as much as individual strength.
“The trade-off between quantity and quality is everywhere. It's in the food you eat, the books you read, the offspring you choose to raise,” Matt said. “It was interesting to trace how ants dealt with this throughout their long evolution. We could see how lineages went in different directions, shaped by different constraints and environments, and ultimately gave rise to the extraordinary diversity we see today.”
Read more: Our ancestors made yogurt from live ants – and the recipe still works
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