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.
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"
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?”
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
