ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2021
Allometric analysis of brain cell number in Hymenoptera suggests ant brains diverge from general trends.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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11 citing papers in PubMed, 45 citations in OpenAlex.
- Evolution of neurometabolic frugality in harvester ants.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2026Article
- When a bigger brain is better: The case of bee olfactory learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Sex- and Male-Morph-Specific Variation in Brain Mass and Cell Number Scaling in Solitary Centris pallida (Hymenoptera: Apidae) Bees.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2026Article
- The brain atlas of a subsocial bee reflects that of eusocial Hymenoptera.Genes, brain, and behavior · 2024Article
- The influence of age and sex on the absolute cell numbers of the human brain cerebral cortex.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Cell-based allometry: an approach for evaluation of complexity in morphogenesis.Quantitative biology (Beijing, China) · 2023Article
- A searchable image resource ofeLife · 2023Article
- Efficient parameter calibration and real-time simulation of large-scale spiking neural networks with GeNN and NEST.Frontiers in neuroinformatics · 2023Article
- White Paper: An Integrated Perspective on the Causes of Hypometric Metabolic Scaling in Animals.Integrative and comparative biology · 2022Article
- Social Brain Energetics: Ergonomic Efficiency, Neurometabolic Scaling, and Metabolic Polyphenism in Ants.Integrative and comparative biology · 2022Article
- Allometric analysis of brain cell number in Hymenoptera suggests ant brains diverge from general trends.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
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3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
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Abstract
Many comparative neurobiological studies seek to connect sensory or behavioural attributes across taxa with differences in their brain composition. Recent studies in vertebrates suggest cell number and density may be better correlated with behavioural ability than brain mass or volume, but few estimates of such figures exist for insects. Here, we use the isotropic fractionator (IF) method to estimate total brain cell numbers for 32 species of Hymenoptera spanning seven subfamilies. We find estimates from using this method are comparable to traditional, whole-brain cell counts of two species and to published estimates from established stereological methods. We present allometric scaling relationships between body and brain mass, brain mass and nuclei number, and body mass and cell density and find that ants stand out from bees and wasps as having particularly small brains by measures of mass and cell number. We find that Hymenoptera follow the general trend of smaller animals having proportionally larger brains. Smaller Hymenoptera also feature higher brain cell densities than the larger ones, as is the case in most vertebrates, but in contrast with primates, in which neuron density remains rather constant across changes in brain mass. Overall, our findings establish the IF as a useful method for comparative studies of brain size evolution in insects.
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