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…”
Absolutely! The mentality that it’s “wasted time and resources” is exactly how you extinguish progress, invention, and ultimately the ability to innovate existing tools.
I remember listening to an NPR podcast and it was talking about wasting money in science. There was that “shrimp fight club” and millions being spent on it. Turns out the money was for a science lab and for students wages and just a bit of money went on the shrimp experiment. Didn’t stop the headlines though. When the scientist went to explain the point to the politicians. They said that the shrimp shells were so resilient and lightweight and studying it could yield military benefits. The politician said that they would only care about that specific use case. The scientist had to explain you don’t get one without the other.
I freaking love that! And I have a feeling conversations like that happen pretty often, and I have to know if they are documented now!
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.
I mean, we could even try to extract how this works and use it to create a biological processor. Or a myriad of other stuff. This is actually a really interesting discovery
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.
But wait, the ants that were clipped, how did that work without painfully clipping their legs and how did they return them back to normal to go back home?
If these creatures can experience pain in the same conceptual way we do: they painfully clipped the ants legs and they didn’t return them to normal. Those ants were in hell.
Else: it was painless and the ants still had stump legs for the rest of their existence.
Which is why the meme is “Haha funny tall ants are dumb” instead of the slightly less fun “Ants without legs are confused af”
Well shit…
Stilts (for life)
🤭
Thank you! Link please ❤
Here’s the article: https://www.science.org/content/article/ants-stilts
And here’s what I think is the official scientific paper (says free with login): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16809544/
Thank you!
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
I’m not sure… ants walk really far. Think of how long it takes us to get human children to the point where they can count to 1000. Do ants just hatch with a sense of numbers?
I don’t see why not. Storing a count is not so complex and the animal kingdom is filled with impressive (to our perception) mental feats* (like the dedicated neurones for each octopus tentacles).
Ironically, I find the act of following a pheromone trail counting steps way simpler than them having detailed mappings of their surroundings.
Edit: fears -> feats
The next question is going to be what the maximum number of steps an ant can store is and what happens when it overflows…
I think you’re approaching it too much like a computer scientist. I don’t think that organic brains have hard limits like that, or stack overflow, etc.
Woosh
I’m wondering if the “counting” could be derived from a form of proprioception rather than maintaining an active count. Distance just gets scaled and thrown off by longer legs.
You don’t need a sense of numbers, in the abstract mathematical way humans use, to count.
Maybe a human child can’t count to 1000 but they could be taught to put a BB inside a jar every step they take. Then they can take a BB back out of the jar at every step on the way back. When the jar is empty, they’re near home. Even if they can’t count at all, they can keep track of thousands of steps this way given enough attention span and stamina.
Then, just imagine, instead of a BB’s in a jar it’s some chemical signal in the brain.
Maybe its less like a number as we know it, and more like an ant poem or other mnemonic representation?
Yeah, I always thought it amazing that crows could keep track of items up to five. Maybe we read that one wrong if ants are capable of counting so high, or maybe they’re not exactly counting. I’d love to know more.
I’m pretty sure the ants are using a memory palace (method of loci).
It’s simple, they just remember all their siblings born after them, until they arrive at their food. So once they reach Jant they know the food is close. Simply count backwards until they reach Trant and they’re home.
Quorum sensing does not require a conceptual framework of numbers. The conceptual framework is the harder part, your brain and many cells perform quorumsensing and computations all the time that you would find difficult to do by hand, or to do symbolically.
Anyone else wondering how they even thought “Do ants count their steps?” To begin with ?
Let alone “Do ants count ?”
I immediately know why and its not about steps its about communication. How do the ants know how many steps to the food? its because other ants communicated it. Im 99% sure that is what the study was about. So there is a lot they are verifying. communication. mathematical concepts, how they parse distance. remember the foot is called that because it was sorta an average size of a foot. yard is basically a stride.
Or if they can even walk on stilts. I know if some aliens came down and attached stilts to my legs I would just lay down and die.
Same, but not before I bust my shit on the pavement and scrape my knees bloody. Fun times–for the aliens.
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 always assume they just left a trail of ant stank on the ground and everyone followed it to wherever the food was.
Different species of ants have different methods.
How do you determine an ant is confused ?
If you woke up with stilts on one day wouldn’t you be confused? Seems self-evident that ants would be too. Like, “I don’t remember going to bed with stilts on, wtf man, what was I on last night?”
They didn’t made it back to their nest.
But they kinda say the ants only gets confused once they reach too far and there is no food
You ask it
But will you get an antswer?
Will they be pedantic about it?
Ped— ant— ic
Jesus, in a post about walking ants, this is the greatest word play ever.
What is this? Stilts for ants?
The second half of this experiment is far less wholesome:
To verify their findings, these scientists reran the experiment by cutting off ants’ legs at the knees. Those ants consistently undershot their targets, showing definitively that ants do actually count their steps.
So yay, verified results via torture!
Unfortunately most if not all of animal science involves torturing animals :'(
On one hand… way to be assholes “scientists”.
On the other hand… I didn’t know technology existed that could possibly fix a broken spider leg and I need it.
For a friend?
2024: “Pfft, look at these scientists wasting time and money figuring out if ants count their steps. Ridiculous!”
2124: “…and that’s how the Ant-Step Computational Model allowed us to build the Warp Drive!”
I read ant bootie and thought of something ENTIRELY different
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I wonder if they happen to use base 10?
I’d guess base 6 with their 6 legs.
I think they use base 1 because they have 1 “finger” on each leg
Every base is base 10.
Woah
Scientists should teach AI to be more like ants, maybe then it can finally do better math.
They could just teach the ants to be an AI like in a certain Tchaikovsky novel.
