How Jumping Genes Helped Ants Take Over After the Dinosaurs
Updated: 1 day ago
Ants have been around for a very long time, roughly 140 to 168 million years. Yet for most of that time they were a small, fairly unremarkable group. They only became the dominant insects we know today after the asteroid impact that ended the age of the dinosaurs, about 66 million years ago. A new study in Science Advances, published on 3 October 2026, explains how: with jumping genes.
What are jumping genes?
Jumping genes, or transposable elements, are pieces of DNA that can copy themselves and move around in the genome. They used to be seen as genomic parasites. Today scientists see them more and more as engines of evolution, because they can shuffle and copy genes.
A burst after the asteroid
An international team led by Lukas Schrader of the University of Münster compared the genomes of 163 ant species from 12 of the 16 living subfamilies. They found bursts of jumping gene activity in the ancestors of the largest ant groups around 66 million years ago, shortly before those groups split into many new species. The ant lineages with the most jumping genes are also the richest in species today. "We have now found the genomic mechanism that connects these ecological upheavals to the subsequent rapid diversification of the ants," Schrader says.
Why smell is everything
The jumping genes were linked to the growth of gene families involved in chemical communication. That is no small detail. Ants live in a world of scent: they find food via scent trails, recognise nestmates by their smell and coordinate the whole colony with chemical signals.
What this means for ant keepers
You see this scent world every day in your setup. It is why ants follow the same trail to the feeder, why workers from another colony are attacked immediately, and why you can almost never simply merge two colonies. Every colony has its own smell, and anything that smells different is an intruder. Want to know more about how a colony works? Read our post about the ant colony or 10 bizarre ant facts. And if you wonder how big ants got in the millions of years after the dinosaurs, read about the giant Titanomyrma in what is the largest ant in the world?.
Sources
Schrader, L. et al., 2026. Science Advances.
BBC Wildlife (Discover Wildlife), 2026. Jumping genes and the rise of ants.
Photo: © Anderson Lepco
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