Alzheimer's, Dementia & Mental Health
How We Spend Our Time May Determine the Decline of
Cognitive Abilities, Says Bee Study
When forager bees revert to nursing bee
behavior their brains become 'young' again
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Bee scans the stimulus with her
antennae and learns when she extends her proboscis, she is rewarded
with a droplet of sucrose. |
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July 1, 2009 Cognitive ability declines as people
age but a new study has found that honey bees seem to have solved this
problem. They have discovered that by switching their social role, aging
honey bees can keep their learning ability intact or even improve it.
Maybe the specific kind of daily activities people
engage in during the course of their lives influences the extent of
their mental decline.
A team of
researchers from Technische Universitδt Berlin, led by Dr. Ricarda
Scheiner, are involved in the study of how division of labor among honey
bees affects their learning performance as they age. Dr. Sheiner is to
present the research today at the Society of Experimental Biology Annual
Meeting in Glasgow.
The oldest bees in a colony are the foragers - a
task that demands a high amount of energy, the researchers say. With
increasing foraging duration, their capacity for associative learning
was found to decrease.
On the other hand, no decline was observed in nurse
bees that remain inside the hive taking care of the brood and the queen,
even though their age was the same as that of their foraging sisters.
When the scientists artificially forced a subset of
these foragers to revert to nursing tasks, they discovered that they
learning performance improved again, demonstrating a remarkable
plasticity in their brain circuits.
"The honey bee is a great model", explains Dr.
Scheiner, "because we can learn a lot about social organization from it
and because it allows us to revert individuals into a 'younger' stage.
If we remove all of the nurse bees of a colony,
some of the foragers will revert to nursing behavior and their brains
become 'young' again. We thus hope to study the mechanisms responsible
for age-dependent effects, like oxidative damage, and also to discover
new ways to act against these aging processes."
The scientists are planning to use this as a model
to study general aging processes in the human brain, and even hope that
they may provide some clues on how to prevent these processes.
