Research for the sake of research is how we make discoveries we never thought possible.
The best discoveries are the ones that start with somebody going, “Huh, that’s weird…”
This one’s not even that far out there. Understanding how ants think has direct applications! Ants must take many thousands of steps in a day; being able to count them precisely requires certain cognitive facilities we wouldn’t otherwise know existed. Next step: figure out how those things work with such simple cognition. Then apply that to self-organizing robots and use them to cure cancer or something.
Get stilted losers
-Science
Science is basically journalism about the natural world. If ants have exposed themselves to a laughable scandal, it’s only a matter of time before we’ve nailed their asses to a wall
What is this? Stilts for ants?
How do you determine an ant is confused ?
You ask it
Anyone else wondering how they even thought “Do ants count their steps?” To begin with ?
Let alone “Do ants count ?”
Nah, the way ants can find their way around has been a favorite question of mine, and I know there’s been a ton of people over lifetimes that have had curiosity about how exactly they navigate the world.
This answer, that they do count steps, makes more questions though. How do they count? Is it some kind of chemical reaction? Is it memory, are they counting in a way that we would recognize at all? Like, they could be fancy versions of those click counters bouncers use to keep track of how many people are up in the club, just some kind of chemical or mechanical tracker. It could be other methods that I can’t think of because I know jack spit about ant biology at that level.
Reaching the specific question from “how do ants navigate” to “are they counting steps” isn’t a big gap. I’m kinda surprised it took much time to get there tbh. Not sure when this experiment was done, but it’s way easier than detecting pheromone trails or whatever else has been done.
I wonder if they happen to use base 10?
I’d guess base 6 with their 6 legs.
Every base is base 10.
Scientists should teach AI to be more like ants, maybe then it can finally do better math.
I read ant bootie and thought of something ENTIRELY different
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I hope someone glues stilts to their legs then. What. It’s for science. Because we can’t figure out a better way to study how scientists get stilts glued to their legs.
Wasting budget and time? Grad students get paid?
I wonder if they’re smart to count, or stupid to walk past the food.
Yes
From an article I found online:
A team led by Matthias Wittlinger, a biologist at the University of Ulm, Germany, made modifications to desert ants […]. After setting up an ant home outside the lab, the researchers let 25 ants take a 10-meter trip from their nest, then collected them. For one group, the team glued tiny stilts to the insects’ legs. For another, they clipped the legs down to stumps. And for a control group they left the legs alone. Then the researchers gave each ant a piece of food and set it free. With morsels of food in their jaws, the ants immediately headed home. If desert ants do indeed use an internal pedometer, then the modifications should mess up their calculations.
Not only did the stilted and stumpy ants not make it home, but they also misjudged their distances exactly as the researchers predicted. The ants on stilts went about 5 meters too far before stopping to search for the nest, whereas the stumpy ants stopped about 5 meters too short […] (Control ants got back home just fine.) After the modified ants were returned to the nest, they were able to go out and get back home just as accurately as normal ants, which should be the case if they’re keeping track of the number of steps.
“Wasted”? They’re literally figuring out how the world around us works!
If you ever want to do anything socially unacceptable, just say it’s for science.
Remember, we do what we must because we can.
